


the corners of life

by remnantof



Series: earth 16-2 [1]
Category: DCU, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Aged-Up Character, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Big Bang Challenge, Bilingual Characters, Bullying, Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Death References, Developing Relationship, Earth 16, Earth 16-2, Español | Spanish, Family Drama, First Kiss, First Time, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hand Jobs, Interracial Relationship, Long Distance Relationship, M/M, Missing Persons, POV Second Person, Panic Attack, Physical Disability, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Queer Themes, Teen Romance, Teenagers, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:04:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim and Jaime learn to deal with absence, and each other.  Slow build Tim/Jaime as part of a character study and origin exploration story.  Tim POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the corners of life

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** This story was outlined/drafted during the season two hiatus, and officially departs from canon after Artemis’ death. Most of this has been or will be retconned by the time it is posted, with gaps in canon being filled from the comics or made up entirely. Let’s call it Earth 16-2. Additionally, I had chosen to make the boys 15 going on 16 before their ages were revealed, and then chose to keep that age range for my own comfort with regard to the violence and sexual content in the story. Title, ftr, is from "Ayla" by The Maccabees.
> 
>  **To be clear on warnings** , this story contains: off-screen character deaths, violence, violence involving minors, minor scenes of bullying, bad parenting, resentment of a wheelchair-bound parent from a teenage child/caretaker, casual ableism/language, missing persons case, police interaction, sexual contact between two minors, implied abuse of a minor, POV character experiencing anxiety/ptsd symptoms and panic attacks, grief/grieving, and mentions of hospitals/being in hospitals/and seeing a cadaver/the body of a loved one. There is at least one fight scene between a minor and multiple adult assailants that involves gun violence, harm to a minor, and description of gun violence/death dealt to two adult victims.
> 
> Translation for the Spanish bits is available via Google, because this story is 30k words long, and you're reading it on the internet.

**24 February: Gotham**

The sun rises. Your phone chimes it to you from the toilet. Pulling your head from the spray, you hear Jack griping in the hall, his chair leaving marks on the rugs again. He isn’t speaking to you, showering to pretend you have been asleep, all night, sweating under sheets. He isn’t speaking to a housekeeper, because there is no house now, and you doubt he has a wire.

He’s not speaking to himself, either. 

When you became a hero-- when Batman passed responsibility for the city down to his pupils--life remained surprisingly mundane. Patrol is just another part of your day, and it feels right--the normalcy isn’t so false, even with him awake, home. It’s like the mask, molded to the shape of you, covering what it must to keep you effective. The water bears down no hotter or colder, Jack’s voice is no deeper, weaker--no more or less distant--for the coma. You have school in two hours. Breakfast to make, homework to finish, jeans and shirts to pull on.

You can do these things, because you have the suit. Because your skin has to settle back under civvies, your dick settles without the jock. Tim Drake dresses loosely, in layers. Tim Drake rakes his hair into his face, wipes concealer under his eyes, and bursts from the bathroom. He is a teenage boy: clumsy, inconsiderate with his body. Jack is already rolled to the head of the kitchen table, scowling at today’s paper. You pause, catching the front page. You wonder when the photo was taken. “If you’re worried about the rugs, I can put them away.”

“He got another one,” Jack grunts.

Don’t loiter in the door. You have things to do, this reason to do them, and he does not scare you. You pull eggs and bread from the fridge, open cabinets. “Who?”

“The Bat. He stuffed a new kid in the suit, now word is he’s gone.”

“There’s probably a reason, he works with the League.”

“I wonder how old this one is--no meat?”

Batman is the only reason your father came home. You don’t talk about it--you and Jack, you and Bruce. You can’t save everyone. You can’t know what _saved_ means. Jack was dead, then asleep, awake, grieving, angry, and settled into--this. The healing process. Reaching one day and pushing the next. “There’s eggs--I have a report to look over this morning, I’ll make us something big this weekend.”

“I miss having a cook,” Jack sighs. Oil spray hisses against the pan.

So get one.

She can have my room.

There’s nothing to say, so you say nothing. Your naked fingers crack the eggs and flick emptied shells to the sink, the kitchen becomes sizzling egg whites, a ticking toaster, Jack clearing his throat. “How were the boys?” Toast springs from the toaster with a clear ring: you put his plate together before giving any answer. “They’re fine.” Would details bolster the lie, is it a lie? You haven’t contacted anyone from the academy since leaving. When Jack asks, you picture your new team, the friends you trained with before Batman’s departure. Before your schedule tightened up. You haven’t seen Jaime or La’gaan since Gamma Squad’s success in Louisiana. You’ve barely left the city limits, since Louisiana. “They’re a little jealous of my freedom,” you invent, allowing Jack to let himself off the hook for pulling you back to public school.

You can’t imagine managing Gotham, your father, and your squad from Brentwood. You got into enough trouble there before you took on vigilantism as an extracurricular. “I don’t think the staff misses me much.”

Jack hums, picking apart his eggs with the fork. “You’ll get the hang of it.” What he’s trying to say, you’re not sure. His eyes don’t lift from the food, his tone suggests that he’s saying nothing. You’re almost sixteen: you’ve been to four different schools in the last two years. You’ll _get the hang of it._

You set half a grapefruit next to his plate, sans sugar. He looks at it the way he looked at your picture on the front page. “I’ll get the dishes later.”

-

The report is stared at for forty-five minutes. Underlined words are respelled and the print button is clicked, but you’re not sure what the sum of your thoughts was, what you managed to say about a play you didn’t read. When your job is a little more like the movies, when a Shakespeare-themed killer breaks out of Arkham, you’ll revisit your copy. Right now it’s just a red glow on your eyelids and the whine of the printer, resting that becomes a doze until your phone goes off, telling you to catch the bus.

Forget the suit. The truth behind your success is a good reminder app.

Math is easier. Math is easiest when you’re doing it with your body, but your mind isn’t far behind. This teacher likes worksheets, likes word puzzles and bad jokes. Sometimes you solve the riddle and work backwards to get the answers, lose points for not showing your work. You’re smarter now, or just too tired, to give some sarcastic remark, be a little shithead. Smartass isn’t a sign of brilliance when you’re a straight C student. Smartass was a waste of your family’s money at Brentwood and it’s a waste of your time now, energy you need for--reality.

There is no chime for Andy pulling you out of your locker and pressing you into the one next to it, but this is also routine. “Where’s your English paper?”

“I’m getting a D.”

“Well, now I’m getting a D and you’re asking for an extension.” Andy can see the future. He tells you what’s about to happen, and it happens, the exchange made just before Steph rounds the corner and speeds up to meet you. You laugh when he lets go. What better cover is there than letting Steph fight your battles?

Tim Drake: clumsy, bad student, still a shithead.

“Just kick his ass,” she says when you lean back into your locker, filling your bag for the day. “One good punch, make it flashy, and no one touches you anymore. I mean, I’d love to kick his teeth in, but I can’t afford the suspension.”

“No one’s going to kick his teeth in.” She thinks about it. Steph thinking is squinting brown lashes and her bottom lip tucking just-so. Steph thinking, about anything, always looks like taking aim, like angling herself to do something physical. “Thanks,” you remember to add, smirking and handing her your bag. She carries it to homeroom for you, pecks you on the cheek, shoves the weight of it hard and sudden into your arms. You don’t know why this is fun, if fun is even the word--but it passes time, it doesn’t require talking, sharing. The force of her presence and personality layers over yours, distracts you from yourself, makes her laugh.

Sometimes people are easy. You spent enough time on the outside, just watching, that the speed with which you know them doesn’t raise any flags. Steph is a good person, currently in no position to hurt. Bruce is complicated, but capable of being pleased, and you want that. Dick is somewhere between them, and Barbara is more like yourself, but better at it, more practised. “Did you do the worksheet,” Steph asks, and you hand it over willingly. “Kind of.”

“Busy night?”

“Week.” Four homicides, eight robberies, gang response to both, general restlessness, and that’s since Friday. Scrubbing at your face with your hands, you go higher, rub at your scalp. After a long night, your face just itches. Adrenaline, maybe. Adrenaline and concealer, and the itch that something is wrong in his city.

“I could help with that too. I mean the big guy is out of town and I still think I can take the redhead.” You told Steph everything a few months ago, after a rainy lunch smeared some of the makeup away from a bruise, had her asking the obvious questions and sympathizing in a way that made your stomach turn. You’d paid her a visit the week before, in costume, chasing her dad and his contemporaries out into the streets. He’s crawled back a few times, but they don’t hold meetings at the apartment anymore. “I fucking knew it,” she’d said: “Capes just don’t give a shit about someone like him.”

She’d punched you in the arm to say thanks, then demanded to know everything. Including Barbara’s number.

Fast friends; easy to read. It happens, and this is safer than the moments at Brentwood. Boys hovering in the hall, questions behind the fringe of their bangs: do you really want to go back to your room? Do you really want to do this, alone?

Kind of, yeah. “It’s not like the WWE.” You’ve said it before, you say it every time. The stories are entertaining, the reality is something else, entirely. “I know,” she answers. She could be telling you to shut up, she could roll her eyes. She could slither into meanness and spit it at you, what she knows of violence. But she just grins, turns to include the girl on her other side without offering any context, just her confidence, her self aimed at what she wants, right now: “That shit is fake, I’m not interested in pulling any punches.”

Sometimes people are easy. The force of her presence and personality layers over you and protects, buffers, fills in the gaps--but sometimes it smothers. Sometimes people are too much themselves, too unapologetic, too loud, too _much_. There would be no black on her suit, only bright red, bright yellow, the shock of her hair. She aims herself at what she wants, and she gets it, still chatting with the girl as she copies your worksheet.

You can’t let her aim herself at this.

-

There are bad moments on patrol. There are bad moments in Happy Harbor, in countries halfway across the globe. You stuff them in a box, move on, try not to repeat them too often. At lunch, phones are everywhere, on hand, on chain, flashing and calling out, vibrating. Texts move around the cafeteria, start fights, end relationships, make plans. Steph makes fun of you three times, shaking her head at the way you pull out the phone, look at it, put it back. The fourth time, she, knocks her tray into yours. “Make the call, eat.”

There are bad moments on patrol, but this is the bad moment that happens every day. You hate phones: you can take them apart, put them together, text until your thumbs cramp. But the sound of the line ringing makes dread set solid in your stomach, your scalp itch, your joints jump. Pick up pick up pick up. You walk away from the table, every time, check your screen for the signal. Chide yourself later: you know the bars don’t mean anything. Just the ringing, the cutoff, please wait while your party is reached.

Ten rings. There’s sweat between your palm and the phone now. You can’t leave a message. You can’t wait for a call, this long without sleep and the rest of your day to finish. Thirteen rings, the click. Tim Drake is allowed to sag against the wall, smile. “Hi dad, just checking in.”

“Still can’t go anywhere,” he answers.

“You know that isn’t true. Just take your phone if you do.”

“I will, Timbo, I’m fine.”

“I know, I’m just...making sure.”

The second click. He’s kind of a shithead, too.

-

**28 February: Happy Harbor**

Bart Allen can see the future too-- _has_ seen it--but Bart is actually dangerous. He doesn’t want your homework, your money, a certain look on your face. You’re not sure what he wants, but you can’t trust him. He came back for a reason, and if he’s staying, he hasn’t fulfilled it yet.

Nightwing debriefs the present team members on what he already told you. You pull Garfield away from his tutor for a word. What to tell him, what you can afford to tell him, falls away at his excuses. In retrospect, it’s not your best moment, and Dick will remind you how and why that evening. “Yeah, secret identities, I gotcha.” Garfield yawns. Part of you really wants to work it out, what he’s signalling when he shows his fangs. “Is it really that big a deal, I thought we were all orphans anyway.”

“I’m not,” you growl, staff dug to the wall and leaning over what is still, fangs and all, a child. His grimace is sharper than yours, if no deeper, and you’re not sure who turns away first. You head for your room, he heads for--

Dick knocks, taps _open up_ with his fingers on the door, and brooding would just invite him to overide the lock. “Teenager, dark room, laptop--maybe I should come back later.”

You ask for light and receive. He removes his mask, hops to sit on the edge of your desk. It’s rude to hide from him, but you don’t want to look him in the eye right now. Closing the laptop makes him laugh, reach out. He’s trying for your face, but his hands stop. You don’t think you’ll ever work out the context of--contact. The people who think they can and cannot touch you, the when, the how, why. If you were training, there would be no hesitation. You’d move or get your head knocked back from the chin. Andy picks you up, Steph holds your hand, Garfield elbows you. Jaime picked you up in both arms and carried you back to the bioship in Louisiana. Dick’s hand falls back to the desk with your eyes on it, through your lenses.

“He’ll come back.”

Your eyes go wide, contort the mask, from his laughter. He won’t reach far enough to touch you, but he’ll say that, and laugh. Behind the mask, behind your skin, is something bitter to choke on. You don’t answer, until he’s forced to shift his position and coax you. “Tim. It’s okay.”

“Is it?”

“Garfield _is_ a kid. He _isn’t_ a liability, though. To be perfectly honest, it’s a bigger liability to keep secrets from your team.”

“And yet.” Bitterness subsides: you just roll your eyes.

“And yet.”

His hand lands this time, patting your shoulder. “Ice cream is a great way to smooth things over, for the record.”

-

**8 March: Gotham**

“What is this.”

Dick looks--offended. “It’s a snowcone, boy wonder--”

“I know what it is.” You fall into vexation, voice huffing and the register strikes you, how alike you sound. Your mentor isn’t that much older than you at all. You crawl out of it: “What is it _for_.”

“Mixed bag,” his head tilts, demures. Ice cream smoothes, ice cream is consolation and you swear you’ll pay back the tilt and tuck of his head in circus peanuts or your staff to his face, heat under your skin and miss her miss her you _miss_ her, sharp, with the beat of your pulse. Inside voice. Outside voice pulls out the small, plastic spoon and cools your tongue against syrup and ice. Let the beat cycle in and down, rest it for later, when you need something extra to get through the night. Pre-dawn, when the real bats go to sleep.

Simple sugar tarts your mouth, leaves you thirsty for the way it melts down your throat. “So pick something.”

Robin is a detective, but you’d rather save that as well. Sliding and slotting Dick around in your mind can be worse than a brain-freeze: both would hardly be a consolation for the way things are. “A lack of face-time,” he asks, letting you hang on for the explanation. “You’re spending a lot of weekends here, away from the team.”

“So is BG,” you concede. Neither of you is Batman, but Gotham gets by in halves, four hands covering four leaks in the dam instead of two. All traces of the week are slept and showered off for the weekends: longer patrols, when you can’t be spared to the Harbor. Life stays structured and stretched over that schedule. Sleep in the afternoons, first a snack for Jack and yourself, the promise of dinner, a nap before you prepare it. Two meals together every day you can manage--like a normal family, you guess. He showers, you wait, help him back into his chair. Another nap, sometimes in plain view. Tonight you were on the couch, sleeping on him through the game. He’d hesitated to wake you, started to doze off and lean on you in turn. “Come on,” he’d murmured, like he was the one putting you to bed. “Can’t sleep here, Tim.”

It’s nice, when he’s already sleepy, when he lets you take the weight of him against your side and there’s just the flicker of the television, the creak of the seat, the smell of his sweat somehow new and familiar at once. You’re afraid to like it, admit that you like it--but having him in one place, having him in a place that is close to you--it’s something to appreciate.

It just cost too much. Robin cost too much, but you live with the guilt, with putting him to bed every night before those last few hours of sleep. Your phone vibrates under your pillow at midnight, every night, and for the next six hours, Tim Drake doesn’t exist. Slick the hair up, zip the soft flesh into armor, climb out the window, fly.

Missing her drains out of you, red ice wanes to white and you drop it into the alley. “BG gets this weekend,” Dick says, “You get the next two, you could use a break.”

“Because I snapped at Beastboy last time, or because you feel guilty.” Your staff snaps down, pointing after the cup. You keep the tone mild, wondering--not demanding. “Ouch,” he says anyway, kicking at your staff with an idle foot. “Because you could use a break? Because I’m trying to divide the responsibility up as evenly as I can without pulling you out of school?”

You could snag your staff around his ankle and pull, roll off the roof and lose at tag for awhile instead of having this conversation. Or the signal could come on, lighting up the smog from underneath. “Whose hands do you intend to leave the team in, ultimately.” Barbara makes more sense, Barbara is older, has more training, is _better_ \--but you keep walking into missions with his hand on your shoulder, pulling you back, giving you advice. _Don’t die_. What do you need to stay alive for? What is he going to expect, how much are you going to be trusted with?

What you’re trying to ask is--is when there won’t be ice cream, when there won’t be backup. When _don’t die_ is something you say instead of hear, and someone else has to tuck your dad into his bed at night, because you’re not there. You’re here, every night, all night, two hands holding all the cracks. There’s a cold lump in your throat telling you that’s what it’ll be, in the end. Gotham, without Bruce, wishing you had time for snow cones and questions.

Dick looks back from the signal, squints enough to compress the mask, wrinkle it over his nose. Not even a handful of years between you, but he remembers them suddenly, remembers that he doesn’t, actually, have to answer you. “We’re going to work on your grades when he gets back,” he says, taking you in hand and reeling you back out. His grace can be harsh, you’ll have to remember that.

-

**15 March: Happy Harbor**

Dick meant what he said about giving you a break: a week later you say goodbye to Jack and board a bus for the manor--feel and reject the desire to touch his hand or kiss his cheek, as she had--use the cave’s zeta tube to walk cautiously into base, and fail to relax when you find your team out of uniform watching Food Network. It’s your first week back since the mission in Louisiana, but Dick contacts the team as Jaime jogs over with an expression of disbelief. “No mission this week,” Nightwing says, “There’s a training schedule for everyone, but otherwise orders are to lie low for now.”

Jaime holds the back of his head. Behind him, a woman squeezes ridges of icing onto a cake, smiling brightly. “Man,” he says, “I was going to say it’s been awhile--but last time we didn’t have a mission? Your broody alien kidnapped me and I had to help an Ent go to the light, so instead I’m going to beg you to put on pants and head out for awhile.”

The directness suits him and startles you; behind the lenses you just blink, willing yourself to say something, anything, to carry the moment over. You haven’t seen him in weeks, and yet: you have helped the other up in training, ridden the shock of an explosion through the sea and eventually, he carried you back to land. You remember, that. This is--surprisingly similar, when it shouldn’t be. “You’re assuming I brought pants.”

His whole face opens, pleasantly offended until the slant of your mouth gives you away. “Ask La’gaan if he wants to join us,” you suggest, holding up three fingers for the three minutes it will take you to meet him back at the tubes. He seethes the beginnings of a protest, but when you look back, doesn’t seem to be talking to you.

You remember that, too.

As you cross the entertainment area, the woman holds up her finished cake. “It seems counter-intuitive,” she says, “but remember, the secret to this ultra-moist cake is to immediately freeze the base, and allow time for a slow thaw.”

-

“La’gaan’s exact words weren’t really words,” Jaime reports, face pinched in disgust, “but he got the message across. He’d rather suck face con la Roja.” He makes a noise like a cat with a hairball, tilts his head and presumably takes in your civvies. “Kind of overcast for shades, Rob.”

You shrug, shift the sunglasses a little higher on your nose and find enough comfort in the way your lashes tap against plastic as they settle, to realize you weren’t.

Comfortable, that is.

When you walk to the tubes without answering, Jaime only hesitates for a moment before catching up, hovering at your elbow. “Do you think he puffs out in the bedroom,” he asks. Only the surreal pull of and slight nausea induced by zeta travel let you keep a straight face, asking mildly, “To what end?”

“I don’t know,” his laughter is a bark, “It felt like the joke to make.”

“...the bad joke to make.”

He shoves you, makes you the first one stumbling out of the bathroom the zeta tube left you in, into a local park. Behind the glasses you blink, looking up at the contrast of bright tents and lights against the grey sky. “Did you know they were having a fair today,” you ask, feeling him come up to your elbow again, his jaw in your peripheral vision. “Nah,” he shrugs, “But why not?”

Before you can open your mouth, explain more than a few reasons you should both stay away from it, think about the way the tents make your stomach cramp--he’s shoving you again, running ahead without announcing the race.

Is that the third or fourth time, that he’s put his hands on you today? You’ve only been in Maine for half of an hour.

Settling as much as you can in your own skin, you check the fit of your glasses with one hand and run to catch him at the gates.

-

“I’m still not feeling the shades,” Jaime says, two hours later at the top of a gently halted ferris wheel, the car rocking under your weight and the structure itself rocking in the winds off the harbor. It’s already rained a couple of times since you left Mount Justice, quick showers while you sat under awnings, spraying water into a clown’s mouth, throwing balls hard enough to break bottle-pyramids the owners had painstakingly glued together. Jaime had laughed at your embarrassment, grabbed the prize from your hands when you tried to hand it back. The stuffed unicorn is soggy from the second shower, and pressed between you in the car. He’s saving it for his sister. You didn’t know he had one.

The popcorn is all for him though, his hand a shovel loading it into his mouth, adding single kernels while he chews. “Are you afraid of heights,” you ask, ignoring the question. His mouth and brows slant a _no_ , and you apologize. “You just seem nervous.”

Another gust hits the ride, rattling it, and a couple behind you shrieks and laughs. You wouldn’t blame him if he was. Every corner you turn of the fair has left you braced for an accident. When it rained, you felt calmer, trapped in one place for awhile. Sometimes you know better than to go looking for trouble.

You have to, knowing what you do. “I’m not nervous,” he says, shoving the paper bag at you, making you eat with salt all under his nails, his voice, his skin. He’s _something_ , since the moment you stepped into base, ready to grab you and run. What has your team been doing, these past weeks? Why haven’t you kept up with it? “Jaime,” you say, reaching for the place between Bruce’s command voice and Dick’s fraternal exasperation. “I--”

You hit the mark. Bad idea. Jaime’s gaze narrows like he’s picking something out on your face, and he doesn’t like it. You lick the back of your teeth, searching for husks.

The ferris wheel creaks back to life, dragging you along its arc until you reach the bottom. Popcorn crunches under your feet climbing off, and you have to remember the toy for him, chase him again with the light getting dimmer through your lenses.

There’s a swamp where the park used to be when you get out of the fair, and he’s waiting for you, hands in the pockets of his hoodie and the hood up against the chill. Next time, you’ll insist on a movie, a walk through the mall. Something indoors, because Maine isn’t much better than Gotham this time of year. “Have you figured out the climate control in your room,” you ask, getting a snort from him.

“Been around a lot more than you, ese.”

You snort back, rub a hand up your face, under the glasses with your eyes closed so there’s nothing to see. Settle them, push the plastic into the skin, sigh. “You tired or something,” he asks, taking the stuffed toy like it amounts to any kind of burden.

Yes. “No, I’m just--not really a fan of these places.” Lights and noise, children calling out, parents snapping, families taking photos.

“Afraid of carnies?”

Your free hand pushes back through your hair, damp, with the gel washed out. “Something like that.” You expect him to laugh, tease you about it, but he surprises you again.

“Why didn’t you say something? I didn’t plan this, we could’ve gone anywhere. Like, with a roof.”

“I thought you wanted to eat your weight in funnel-cake.”

“Naw ese, that shit would get _expensive_.” He holds up a hand and rubs his thumb and fingers together: who even does that anymore?

Shaking your head, you turn with him and start squelching back along the park. Halfway across, another shower blows through, chasing you into the shelter of a large tree. “I guess the unicorns did die in the flood,” he snorts, inspecting the dirty toy. “I could fly us back,” he offers, showing his teeth when he grins, “If anyone asks why I’m carrying you, I’ll tell them you’re having an emergency.”

Christ. You say it out loud, for effect, and to keep from laughing. He laughs for you, but it dies out. You resist the urge to tilt your shades down and get a better look at him, losing visibility between the shade and the storm. He does you a favor leaning closer, looking at you, but his face is still a shadow against a wall of grey rain. When he reaches up, you let his hand get entirely too close to your face before you back up into the trunk of the tree. He stops reaching before you have to bat his hand away. “I just wanted to see your face--everyone’s seen mine.” You remember Garfield and hold your tongue, think about the fact of Jaime’s sister, how he’ll probably--

Probably assume what everyone else does: that your family is gone, that the Bat is your family.

You don’t really blame them.

“I can’t.”

“It’s getting dark though? I really don’t get this, but--” the shadows change, you squint to make out the crushed difference of his face. “Man, whatever, I’m an idiot.”

That should be the end of it, the hiss of rain quieting around you as it lets up. “Why?”

You’re both idiots.

“‘Cause I thought--like, I don’t even know what to think up here. Shit keeps happening with or without you, you know--and La’gaan is busy with M’gann and M’gann is _creepy_ \--and Gar is like ten and Conner has his phasers set to condescend on a good day and kill the rest of the time. Like, it’s you or the girls and I’m thinking I should let Cassie toss me into the Atlantic by accident because you’re back and I can’t decide if--”

“If what?”

“If I really want to talk to you? We’re the new kids and I’m pretty sure we’re the same age, and that’s going a long way right now, but the reality is kind of _eh_. I had fun, I’m not trying to say something bad, but like--Conner acts like I’m stupid, the girls have lives, the green people need hobbies, and you wear your sunglasses at night.

“You flinched away from me like I was going to do something, what did you think I was going to do?”

You’re still squinting in the half-light, and it feels like you’re missing a lot more than the expression on his face. Too much for it to help you get it, because you don’t get _any_ of it. Everything seemed forward and up front before--he wanted to get away from base, he needed you to...entertain him, keep him company. Not evaluate you for something else. “What did you want to talk about?”

He takes a step closer, then stops, folds his arms. “No, we’re not going to _loom_ ,” he mutters, probably not to you. He sounds a lot less sure of himself when he’s done: “My question wasn’t rhetorical?”

“I’m sorry? I am--I am, but I’m not supposed to take them off if I can help it. The only reason I can even wear civvies with you guys is Nightwing used to do it with his team, Batman is really not into it.”

“And if Batman told you to walk off a bridge because you’re wearing sunglasses in the dark, you’d do that?” His voice is different, light enough that you think he believes you. Maybe wants to believe you, or just wants to get going before the rain comes back. This could come up again, over and over--in your experience, these conversations always do.

“Would you catch me,” you ask, reaching for that tone, that cutoff, “if I did?”

He shoves you again: “ _Menso_.”

You bounce off the tree without laughing, and he puts his hand on your sternum before you can stumble forward. “You can talk to me,” you tell him, while he holds it there. “It’s not like this because I want it to be.”

“¿De verás?”

It takes longer to walk back to the zeta tube, your footsteps heavy and wet. In the bathroom he grabs your sleeve, leads you through the dark when your disguise leaves you blind.

-

**18 March: El Paso**

**obiwan ur my only hope**

**Beetle** escarabajo@mtj.org  
to Robin  
11:25am

I’ve got a half day at school today and something I’ve been meaning to ask you. I know your social skills are lacking and I got kind of mad last week, but I’ve been dealing with a situation here tbh. My friend has been missing since last month and he isn’t the only one, I want to revisit some things but the others are busy and i figure you would know the most about non-conspiracy-alien-illuminati-ent things.

Not that the illuminati alien missions aren’t fun, but they didn’t leave a pod person behind and i don’t know what to do. I miss him and he’s my friend so maybe i am not seeing something b/c of a bias, that is a big batman thing right? I mean if you can’t make it, i understand but would it be cool to bounce theories off of you?

Ps. My sister liked the toy and says ty  
Pps. Ro3in, srsly?  
 _Sent via Android for T-Mobile_

**re: obiwan ur my only hope**

**Robin** ro3in@bsig.org  
to Beetle  
10:43am

You could have told us sooner. Sorry it hit so close, missing persons are up in most metro areas lately, this could be “alien illuminati” related but for an individual better to treat it like it isn’t. You can email me what you know or tell me in person, I think I can get there awhile after you get out of school.

Sorry again about the weekend.

Glad she liked it; third robin hence ro3in.  
 _Sent via XXXXX for XXXXX_

**re: obiwan ur my only hope**

**Robin** ro3in@bsig.org  
to Beetle  
11:13am

On my way eta 12:30 via tube.  
 _Sent via XXXXX for XXXXX_

-

**gpoy me @ everything u just sent**

**Beetle** escarabajo@mtj.org  
to Robin  
12:47am

attached: kanyeblink.gif  
 _Sent via Android for T-Mobile_

**gpoy me in the desert**

**Robin** ro3in@bsig.org  
to Beetle  
11:59 pm

attached: explainthisbiketoyourneighborsifudontgetherein5.jpg  
 _Sent via XXXXX for XXXXX_

-

“Uh, I brought donuts.” Impulse-purchased in the market nearest the school, grabbing lunch on your way to the nest. A costume change, call to the school and ride to the manor saw you walking the bike into Mount Justice, startling Dick in the middle of a briefing with an awkward wave and signal that you were just leaving.

You want to know, but you don’t need to. At least Jaime is telling you things.

"¿Qué?" He stretches after the flight, long lines of black and blue against the dust. You heft the box and squint behind your glasses. The horizon wavers behind him, he's a mirage, laughing at you. "That’s weird. Is this a gringo thing?"

"No? You seemed upset, so.” His smile throws you--and you have been thrown, physically, to compare the shift in your center. He isn’t, he is, could be. Don’t you know that too, living with--

What’s the point, finishing any thought that ends in _absence?_ “I don't know, maybe." Just smile back, the best you can, and watch him smile wider as he grabs at the box. And wider when you don’t let him. Two pairs of sneakers kick up dust and thin, dry grass as he tries again, again. You’re on solid ground, now. No feet sinking, and the sun dazzles when it cuts over or under the edge of your glasses. You laugh because he can’t catch you, he laughs because you’re laughing, until the heat sucks it all out. “Here,” you breathe, handing him the carton.

He takes it, fishing out a donut and sticking in his mouth before going for one more shove. You brace for it, but not the gentleness of it. Soft contact, all inertia and his hand grips your arm, he wouldn't let you fall. When you look up, he's watching, he keeps his hand to himself, eats. "So, I'm flying us back."

"Or we can take the bike."

Jaime considering is a wet tongue over the powder on his lip, eyes on the Ducati and a shrug that turns into a stretch. He isn’t quite as tall as Dick, or Mal, but he’s all length, all powder blue tee and a cut of brown just paler than his arms before the jean. He’s easier, when he’s eating. Most people are, you forget--there’s an extent to which Jack is always easier, now.

When he's done taking in the bike, he takes in you. Straighten your spine, but slow, reacting to scrutiny like a leaf to the sun. Let it be natural. Let it be, as Dick would say, chalant.

Jaime smiles. "Or that."

-

The donuts retire to your backpack and end up crushed between your bodies. Jaime's grip is firm without being too tight, and you teach him how and when to lean with an elbow to his side. His friend is unnamed, left dormant for long enough that you don't feel bad just existing for the ride, feeling someone work with you in close quarters through a stretch of desert--and enough that you feel worse for it when you remember.

His friend is missing. He must be--lonely. Bored sometimes, even as Blue Beetle. There is a difference between action and activity, what you put into and get out of your life.

There is a difference between Robin and Blue Beetle with a Ducati, and a couple of teenagers sliding off one in the middle of the day. The cop keeps looking between your license and Jaime like it's his spotty face on the card. "It says you're only fifteen, how'd you get this?"

"My dad can't drive. It's a restricted license." Jaime looks at you, from the empty space beyond the cop's hip.

"And he can afford that bike, but not a driver?"

Jaime looks harder. Neither of you were dressed particularly well before you drove through the dust and heat: you're both a mess, under sixteen, and your license isn't even from this state. Next time, you're letting him fly you in. "We got the bike before he couldn't drive. Or walk." The cop looks again, a second look at the name instead of pretending to check it over while he stares sidelong at Jaime. You start to flush, but Jaime raises his brows at you, rolls his eyes. It's not worth it.

"Right, well you're a long way from Gotham and your dad, so maybe lay off the passengers." His attention turns directly to Jaime: "And I don't suppose you got a note for why you're out with your friend here instead of your classmates?"

Where you expect him to squirm, Jaime is easy, and Gotham doesn't feel that far away at all. "It's a half day." He shrugs. "They wouldn't let us back in if we did go back." The _sir_ is belated. There's a similar lack of feeling when the cop is pulling away, your license and registration back in your wallet, and Jaime venting against a voice you can't hear until there's nothing left. "Pinche gringo" is just a sigh before he's stretching again, getting a look at what corner you're on.

This isn't about getting lost and hassled by cops, or his knees pressed to your thighs, or solid versus sinking ground. "How involved have they been in finding your friend?"

He snorts. "Not. His mama still thinks this is a misunderstanding, and it's not like they care."

"You mean she didn't report it?"

"It's complicated."

Because most of the time, disappearing is simple. "They can charge her if she doesn't, though. And if he misses enough school--"

"He goes to school on the reservation, and his grandpa is--let's just say he has a different interpretation of what's going on. He trusts Tye to come through this, so it's nothing to do with guys like that."

"Is that what you think? You trust him to just come home?"

"If he'd left the way he wanted to, maybe, but something happened. And that cop isn't going to care, okay? If he saw Tye right now he'd chase him off before he'd ask him if something's wrong. You're from Gotham with a sick dad and a motorcycle you shouldn't have, and I'm the one he's worried about, that's just how it is. I probably grew up right beyond his windshield and he doesn't know me from anyone else, so I don't know him either."

"Alright, no cops, no search. I'm sorry, I just have to ask because at this point--Jaime it's been a _long_ time for this kind of case. After forty-eight hours it's not just a matter of his mom having to explain some missed school, and after a month? She needs to file a report before--" You don't want to say it, when he's already wound, when this is _two weeks_ and grief is a thing--you're not an expert, you can't decide--is hope better or worse for this? What did you want, at two weeks?

_Mom_.

"She needs to file a report because it's possible that we're looking for a body. That someone like _that guy_ could find it before we do." Jaime's hands curl in, nail to palm and blue armor digging out of the skin before he shuts it down with a full-body shudder. "Jaime." Your voice cracks, something he's laughed at before, but now his hands just uncurl.

_Pinche gringo._

He holds his face, wipes his hands down over his eyes and cheeks. "Ugh, I'm not mad at you. I mean kind of, but just forget it. You're helping me. You're here and you're helping, so let's start with--with that. Let's try his mama again."

The cop car rolls past the corner one more time before you catch the next bus.

-

You wait outside while Jaime speaks to Shelly Longshadow, collecting notes with your phone. Tye called late, already at the station. Shelly originally stated that there was an argument; now she explains to Jaime that she doesn't remember--did he come home, did they talk, did he mention where he was going. The questions look up at you from the small screen, you look back. Don't think about it. Bruce called you a great detective and it was a thing--you could be, for Jaime's sake you should be--but the way your mind works is being _open_ , all the time, to every pattern and possible outcome. You could feel Dick behind the mask and gave yourself no reason to disbelieve Bruce as the logical conclusion. You don't want to feel how Shelly Longshadow isn't lying, how she does and doesn't think her son is in trouble, how Maurice has nothing to do with it.

Let Jaime feel it. It's his case.

Jaime visited her first. Incorrect, delete and start over: Jaime visited the station first. The case starts at the station, and this is a courtesy stop. "Please," you hear through the door. "I know you think he's fine, but fill out the report just in case. For you--and. For Maurice."

_It's complicated_ , you add to the list. Another courtesy.

"What would it have to do with Maurice?"

Maurice Bodaway sells pirated videos and dvds; is neither married to Shelly nor a legal guardian to Tye, and is unsurprisingly the dominant personality of the household. Not always by force. Enough, though. 

_Does not mix well with hair-trigger armor_.

"What are you doing on my porch?" Assumptions make an ass out of u and me, but assuming the shadow cast over you is attached to Maurice, neither of you had that far to go. _Bail_ , you text to Jaime. _Back door. Trust me._ You don't have to intuit the fact that Maurice won't appreciate another interview.

You don't have to care about the fact, either. "Last time I checked, your name wasn't on the lease."

"And when did you check something like _that_ ," he asks, reaching the top step to loom. His hand comes up, you let him pluck the glasses from your face for a better look. If Jaime comes out the wrong door--well. Trust him first. Maurice doesn't put his hands on you again, looking honestly confused. You've always looked younger than you are, and you're not that old. "Twenty minutes ago?" Phrasing it as a question lets him think he has the upper hand, that you're rethinking whatever it is you're after. It's a reaction he's used to, probably--especially from someone your age. 

How did Tye react? In your notes, they fought, and he went to stay with his grandfather or Jaime. Intuition says he went to the grandfather when it was too bad for Jaime, intuition says Jaime _knows_ that, and it begs you to ask, "What happened the day Tye left?"

" _This_ again?" His disbelief is still honest, open, and the hand in his pocket tightens until you hear plastic creak, but not snap. He's just a man, and in control of his actions. It fits the pattern. He doesn't do much without reason. "Look, I don't know where the kid went and I don't care. He didn't know his place, so he vacated it, simple as that." It reminds you of Jack. Ten o'clock with the news on mute, subtitles crawling across the screen. Adolescents disappearing at rates even Gotham has to comment on, and he'd turned it up, frowned at the screen and shaken his head. "Can't be helped, can it Timbo? Some people just don't know how to be a family."

You remember how she walked ahead of you on the street, to every corner, every crosswalk, something building up in her as you struggled to catch up.

"I'm the one who never goes anywhere."

It's a month later. You're in Texas. Jaime is coming up the side of the house, calling one of your names. Maurice looks up, just enough for you to duck past him and escape down the steps, pull a spare pair of glasses from your bag. "Your name still isn't on the lease," you say, holding the straps in both hands and jogging to cut Jaime off and herd him down the street.

"Rob--Rob, _stop_." A block away, you dig your heels in at the corner and watch him chase the space you occupy. "You okay? What happened?"

_I don't know where the kid went and I don't care._

"This isn't where we need to be."

"It was your idea--"

"Jaime." He breathes, red in the face. You find a bottle of water in your bag. "I'm not mad either, okay?"

"I'm kind of mad," he huffs.

"But not at each other, right?"

"Mostly." When he drinks, he watches you over the edge of the bottle. "Your glasses changed."

"Not really."

" _Not really_." He splashes the rest of the water at you in a lazy arc, cool against your cheek and throat, where it soaks into your shirt. "I'm not stupid, Rob."

Whether he means the glasses, Maurice, or both, you don't ask. "So you agree that we need to head to the station?"

He lets it go with a roll of his eyes. When you walk level with him, he bumps his hip into yours, hops you off the curb and points down the street. "I agree that you need new glasses, gringo: it's that way."

-

On the bus: he stares out the window, familiar sights blurred when his head tilts a certain way, but he doesn't pull his arm from where it rests against yours. Hot air blowing through the windows takes the chill out of the AC, and his skin is warm against your own. His hand is right there, the connection tilting off at your wrists. The bike was hot and close, the engine roared but the ride was smooth, you concentrated, felt acutely alive. This is sleepier, giving in to dry air and disappointment.

His hand is right there. Sluggish as you are, you're aware of it. Your fingers twitch, and he turns to look at you. "You can get used to it, I guess."

"¿Qué?"

He isn't polite to you. You don't want him to be. "Not seeing someone."

Back to the window. "That's awful."

You pull your hand up, wipe sweat from your neck. "Yeah, it is."

-

The station has cameras on the inside, a few outside, and isn't about to show a tape to a couple of teenagers anyway. If the tapes last more than a day before they're erased. You confer at the statue of Cochise, the sun burning into your shoulders and leaving a rash on the back of your neck. Your belt sticks to you and digs into your ribs. "They told me the cameras are mostly for show, last time."

"Mostly. They probably focus security on the cash office, and if whoever took your friend had been in there, we'd know."

"So you do think he was abducted?"

"I think if nothing turns up at this station, we have to search the highway between here and Houston to be sure, and neither of us can do that today." At the very least, you can't--you shouldn't even be here, and terror claws up your esophagus and settles behind your heart. "Shit."

"Rob?"

You wave off any elaboration and duck around the base of the statue. "I have to make a call." It's almost two, which means you're only several hours late checking up on him. He didn't call you. That isn't a sign, except for how it's a sign for _everything_. "Hey," you say when he picks up. Only four rings, this time. "Sorry I didn't call at noon, a fight broke out at lunch and I forgot--"

"A fight? Tim, you know I can call in a few favors, maybe get you back to Brentwood on one of Wayne's scholarships."

You're laughing before you know what's going on. Jaime leans around the bench to where you're crouched, a hand at your cheek for an illusion of privacy. You clap it over your mouth. He catches your gaze and mouths _what the fuck_?

"Tim?"

"Yeah, yes. I mean, I'm here. We both know I'm not earning any scholarships right now--which is why, uh, I was going to head to the library after school to get some work done. I have an extra credit project, trying to make up for a test I bombed. Are you alright with leftovers or takeout tonight?" You dig your nails into your cheek, hysterical with _something_.

Used to it. You get used to it.

"Sure kiddo, wouldn't want you to miss an opportunity like this. I'll save you something for when you get back."

That's...surprisingly genuine, and you dig your nails harder, stretch your skin and don't think of how gently he wakes you from his shoulder, when you pass out on it. 

Exhale. You want to say thank you, it turns into _okay_ and sliding your phone shut. Jaime watches you stand with wide eyes, lifts his hand--somewhere. It might be your cheek, but you don't know that any more than you know where Tye is, why he is where he is. Jaime's hand doesn't reach its destination either. "Did you--did you _skip school_ to come down here?"

"Yes?" You thought that was clear, that half-days aren't national holidays and-- "Why would you ask me to help you in the middle of the day if that...bothers you?"

There's no joke, no fast answer. Jaime is often sarcastic, often unimpressed and not quite open, but it's genuine when he says, "I...don't know. I guess I never thought you'd just do that, for me, but I didn't think about it, either?"

"I don't like school." I like you. 

"But you like flying to Texas to look for missing persons, okay." That's better, his eyes shift like they lack the will for a full rotation.

"If the company's good," you admit. "And now I have a few more hours for it, so. Last time you were here--did you check the lost and found?"

That look comes back, where he's stripped down to something softer, off-guard. When Jack does it, you want to rip your face off. When Jaime does it--

Still, kind of. "I'll take your silence as a no."

-

It means something, when Jaime picks the skateboard off the shelf with clumsy hands, makes a sound you never heard him make before and closes off again. _Let him feel it_ , but he would anyway--he would know Tye's skateboard, and he would turn to you still soft and off-guard and make you watch him _get it_. Tye is gone, Tye did not sneak onto a bus to save his money, he did not run off to avoid his friend and hitch a ride to Houston. It was his only board, Jaime explains, wrapping it in his arms like you or the attendant might take it from him. "He had to fix it up so many times, but it's how he got around, how he got to mi casa or just--away. He wouldn't leave it Rob, he didn't--leave."

His breath heaves in. That's when you grab his elbow and drag him away from the room, make him skip his feet against the concrete. You start running and can't stop, like Maurice is still behind you, the threat of his scarab taking over, or the threat of everything you can feel people _not saying_. You don't want to know, but you can't outrun the problem and drag him at the same time.

You make it a block and a half before he can't keep up for crying. He drops the board, and that makes it worse; you pick it up for him and herd him into the stoop of an abandoned stop, shield him from the street with your body. His hands hurt prying your arms off the board, and you fight him for it, you have to fight him for it. "I'm going to take this with me," you warn, and somehow it quiets him. "I'll test it, I'll make Nightwing and BG test it, we'll find _something_."

It's not a thing you can promise, but you do.

"I'm sorry," he says thickly, wiping at his face. "I just--why didn't I think of that? Why didn't I think of something so obvious, or ask you sooner, or--I can fly, I could have gone to Houston myself just to _see_."

If you had gone to Bruce sooner. If you had asked them not to go, if you hadn't been afraid that they'd go anyway, and what it would mean. If you had gone with Bruce, or been psychic, been a superhero, been--worth their time. If, if--

One hand holds the board vertically, on your foot. The other touches his elbow, but doesn't hold. "He wasn't--isn't just your friend, is he?"

"I don't know what you're asking," he says, but the way he shoves you--hard, this time, with his hands--and the way he cuts his eyes at you, he does: he just doesn't know why you're asking _now_.

It's a good question. He has a lot of good questions. "We'll find something," you promise again.

When he cuts his gaze again, past your head instead of at it, you read sullenness and avoidance from it. When he keeps looking, eyes getting wider, you check the glass behind him for the source, then turn to confirm that it's Maurice getting out of a pickup across the street. Now you read his shakenness, and something like real terror--and you don't know. You can feel the answer right there, Tye and Maurice, and the way Maurice looms, and Jaime's feelings shoved up in the middle of it, but you can't ask. It's not necessarily a clue to where Tye is, just who, and a reason to find him.

"No," Jaime blurts, then again, with feeling. Herding him up against the door probably isn't the best idea right now, but you plant your hands level with his shoulders and tell him to _stop_. He lets his head fall back with a thud and looks down at you, then sniffs. "I didn't know you'd skip school," he starts, blinking hard. "I didn't know you'd come all the way out here--"

"I did," you say, staring hard through the shades. "I will, you just have to ask. I'm sorry I never made you feel like you could, you know? I'm sorry this _happened_." The lines of him crumble, he cries and crouches, then straightens and tilts his head back. One harsh breath and he's sliding, his posture deteriorates: he's a mess. It kills you. He didn't expect your kindness and it kills you, that you made someone feel that. You probably make a lot of people feel that. "Hey." You secure the board in your backpack with both zippers, giving you a hand to coax him up with. "Come on, this way." The sunlight forces him to suck it in. He wipes his face with one hand and holds the back of your shirt with the other, poking and prodding when he feels the belt. At least it distracts him.

"Could you test it here," he asks.

You could dust it for prints, but you don't have any to match them against. You could swab it for blood. "No. I need to take it to the cave, we have a database there. Based on what they found in Bialya, we're probably dealing with metas or humans with access to alien tech."

The conversation gets you to a vending machine at the dollar store. You gently ease the can of Sprite open before passing it back to him, and he takes a long drink, without letting go of your shirt. His hand trembles at your back. When he lets go, his fingers shake, and slip against your shoulder-blade before retreating, but the rest of him doesn't. "Thank you," he says, sucking the last of it in and breathing it out. You think you feel it stir your hair, but like a lot of things, you’d need evidence to back it up.

Turning, you find him lost in his own hometown, dividing his attention between a sweaty can and the direction you last saw Maurice. Nothing is said that you can hear, but his jaw tightens. You haven't really seen him raw since--not even since training. Raw and green are not the same thing. You still don't like it. You want--to do things about it that don't make sense, aren't your place to do.

Lying though--lying is easy: "It's going to be alright."

His gaze cuts back to you, and he looks like he found _something_. That's the Robin he knows.

-

He walks you back to your bike. You can't stay for dinner, and when he looks at his phone he stops giving you shit. The Sprite can is sitting in a trashcan two blocks back, but his face still looks dried up, desaturated, like you're in the cold light of the cave. "You want to borrow these," you ask, pulling another pair of sunglasses from your bag. Jaime blinks his red eyes and bursts into wet laughter.

"I can't believe--yes I can." Your hands slide together, the glasses slide onto his face, and he keeps laughing. "This makes you Tommy Lee Jones. You're gonna go home and tell your papi you were in a coma--"

"Don't--"

You're nauseous from the slip. Swallow it.

"You're the one with a bug living in you," you say, keeping your face and voice steady until he shakes his head. 

"Don't what," he asks as you swing your leg over the bike. You shift the handlebars until you can look at him in your mirrors.

"Don't let me off the hook yet," you decide, tightening the straps on your pack.

"For _what_?"

"Whatever you were mad at me for. I found a skateboard, not a person."

He has to scream it at you after you kick the engine on, "MAYBE I HAVE LOW STANDARDS, YOU FUCKING PENDEJO," and laughter clutters in your chest until you're on the highway out of town.

-

**20 March: Happy Harbor**

You get three messages on the twentieth. The first is from Jaime: _Anything yet_ , and the second is _I know_ when you tell him to be patient because it isn’t an episode of CSI.

The third isn’t Jaime, but you don’t need a reply after that. Of course he knows, you’re the one forgetting--three weeks since his friend disappeared, you remember _three weeks_. Of course it wasn’t the same, not _her_ , because she isn’t coming _back_ and three weeks wasn’t even the point that you started to get that.

It bled over, sitting at Jack’s hospital bed and the machine took a breath and went _beep, beep, beep_ like it does in your dreams, when the alarm is going off under your pillow. He’s talking to you now, while you stare at the phone in one hand and hold your fork paused in the other. Who’s that, kiddo, Timbo, Timmy, like he lost more than a year of you to--

How long have you been three years old?

Awhile.

A smirk tugs at your face; his tone dips, his elbow jostles you into and back out of the conversation. “Must be a girl, huh?” You almost laugh--it would be good to laugh--but he’s still going through the motions of having a son, and when you tune him out the machine layers over it. Beep, beep, beep, bee--

The third message is from M’gann, and urgent. “Yeah,” you say, “girl. Mind if I head out for awhile?”

He smiles. “Sure. One of us should.”

Beep, beep, beep, beep: you’d used your new muscles to turn him and check for sores from the bed, and they’re still there for that, but he isn’t. 

That’s three weeks, too.

\--

Dinah gets you a glass of water, sets it on the counter beyond your arms. The room cleared out in pairs and threes, confused teens and grieving friends trickling into the halls and tubes. The presence at your back has changed, demigod to a familiar hum just low enough not to make your teeth ache. Jaime moves, you tilt your head enough to watch him lay out on the back of the couch and put his hands on his face.

The water is cold, condensing on the glass and pooling on the counter. “How are you feeling,” Dinah asks from her side of the counter. Your impression of her is somewhere between Stephanie’s mom and a guidance counselor, and she knows enough from her colleagues and the papers that you shrug, drawing beads of water down the glass with your fingers. “I didn’t know her. This is bigger for Conner and M’gann--”

“And Nightwing?”

“Yeah.”

She leans closer, trying to catch your eyes through the glasses. She smells like--food, raw ingredients, meat and the inside of a crisper drawer. Fresh--carrots, you’re thinking of peeled carrots. Too fresh and organic to be familiar. “Everyone is my concern right now. You and Garfield--”

Looking down again, you can see Jaime’s leg over the couch, where he’s been sliding down the cushions, reminding you he’s there as he tries to slide away.

Take a sip of water.

Push your glasses up your nose. “There’s a thing in business--slippage--where you have the estimated and actual costs of trade. When you look at the word, it kind of implies that you’re always losing, right?”

It’s not enough: she squares her hands on the counter and waits. “But in some contexts, that’s a known. There’s always a loss. Slippage is just when that gets _worse_.”

“And that’s how you feel about this?”

She stares you down. You lose, but you’re used to that, you just said--

Swallow.

“Yeah, it is.”

-

Jaime catches you in the hall about the moment you assumed he would, as you drop your pace to let him in next to you. “So, not to be a chismoso--”

“But you are--”

“But I am, but uh, what was la rubia talking about back there? And what the hell were you talking about?”

“I just said--”

“Yeah, yeah--it’s a business term, and I so clearly get most of my chisme around a water cooler. This is a partnership ese--I translate the Spanish, you translate the Gringo.”

“I know the Spanish.”

You stop when he does, watching him clutch the front of his sweatshirt and laugh. It starts off spoken, exaggerated, and ends--or doesn’t really end, just evolves until he’s clinging to your jacket and trying to drag you to the floor. “Scarab,” he gasps, “The gringo says he knows the Spanish. The Spanish, _I know the Spanish._ ” He finally gets you down in a crouch, holds your knees with clawed fingers and lays his head down in his hood. There are tears on his face.

He didn’t know Artemis either. A smile cracks at your mouth, hurts to have on your face. You only bat his hands away once when they reach for your glasses, he pulls them away on the second try. Crouched as you are, your face shouldn’t end up on camera: just in his sights, just blinking at him in the dim hall. “So, blue,” he says, and you nod.

“God, you’re so _white_.”

“You don’t say?”

“Sto--p,” he pleads, hitting your knee with his fist and curling in on another laugh. He’s a parenthesis around your feet, holding your ankle and your sunglasses. “I--I don’t know how,” you admit, setting him deeper into it, until you’re not sure if he’s crying from laughter, or just crying. When he catches his breath, he sniffs.

“So what, is up, with you and Garfield,” he asks again, wiping his face. You’ve moved up from _can’t_ to _don’t want to_ , on the merits of telling him. It’s Jaime, and you have several impressions of him, plenty of time to cement the feeling that he’ll feel bad for what he’s doing now if you tell the truth. Abstractly, it gets more complicated and--it’s sugar on his lips, and the brace of your bodies in a metal car against the harbor winds, and how cold your legs stayed after walking across that field.

He waited two weeks to ask you for help. You...still aren’t. “He knew Artemis.” You blink, deliberately, and remember that he can see it now. “And he’s still coping with his mother’s death.”

“Like you are?”

He can see your surprise, too. “I’m not stupid, ese. With Tye, like--there’s a way you talk when one of them’s gone. I noticed.

“And you’re smiling because?”

Because he’s going to be a good detective. Because you didn’t think other people noticed things like that. Because you want to hunch the rest of the way to the ground, and-- _and_. You take your sunglasses up from his hands and slide them back onto your face. “Because someone,” and you hold the moment, hold them just below your eyes, “knows more Gringo than he thinks.”

You’re halfway to your room, not fighting the smile anymore when he stops wheezing on the floor and yells after you. “MENSO, YOU SAID IT _WASN’T_ AN EPISODE OF CSI.”

-

**21 March: Happy Harbor**

The boat leaves. Freeze has the bridge locked down and it’s one more reason for her to pack up, insist on somewhere warm. A friend from school is doing research in Haiti: they’ve been in talks to acquire land there. It means Jack’s face is pinched when he lays his jacket over his arm and picks up their suitcases, but it means he goes. Male friend, you posit.

She kisses your cheek before she walks to stand beside him on the ferry. Definitely a male friend. Fourteen and change, you wipe your face before you wave and--

It’s not lipstick, smeared on your skin, but it’s her shade of nude and coral with a hint of vomit, stringy between your face and your fingers, weirdly cold. Wipe again, wipe with both hands and get twice the mess, clawing until it comes off red, comes off domino-black--

Blink, look up. She’s waving from the boat. She’s smiling, leaving the city behind. Lean into the railing with your hands slip-staining the metal, salt in the wound but _what wound?_ and you yell BUT I’M STILL HERE to her. She laughs at something, you hear the promise of souvenirs and she misheard you, or you didn’t yell, you never said anything.

You never said anything.

The boat pulled away, the water rushed up the wall and sprayed you until Ms. Mac pulled you back by the arm, sharp, but now there isn’t a soft frown on her face to even it out. Her face is--ugly, split, _clown makeup_ and she honks your nose, pushes you now. Overboard into the center ring, and you stand this time, you stand up in this dream and you say _no_ , but you’re not listening. You feel _mulish_ by now, watching the Graysons fall, like having to suffer through Jack’s latest Antique Roadshow binge and being so _tired_ of watching life from the outside and now you watch _him_ do it from his god damn chair--

But the dream is the dream, and reality is--not so different. The Graysons fall, and you look down at them on the ground until they’re not Dick’s parents anymore, they’re yours, wires growing out the earth to pump some life back into them.

This didn’t happen either. There was no hospital bed, you had to go downstairs to see her. Bruce’s hand in the small of your back tightening just-so, pushing you into it and he’s never, he doesn’t know how to bring you out the other side.

Bruce and Dick have it worse, that’s why there’s hope, for you, right?

Your mother is on a slab wearing pearls she didn’t own, pearls mangled by a grabbing hand and spilling onto the metal. _There’s a way you talk when one of them’s missing,_ and when you paint the color back onto her lips with your fingertip, there’s nothing, just a layer of yourself shed on the grain of her skin.

Upstairs, a machine breathes. _Beep, beep, beep--_

-

“ _Mom_ \--” the second gasp is air, you swallow and shut up and gasp again. Reality is layered and--useless, a large part of you argues, because who _cares_ if this is not your house, and your mother is dead, your mother wasn’t home enough to come running when you called. You want to call anyway, yell like a child.

It doesn’t matter how many people live here. Mount Justice is just another cave.

If he doesn’t pick up his phone, middle of the night or not--

“Tim?”

You hang up. Slide the phone back into your pillowcase and press your face into the fabric until you can’t breathe. This is what you do, right? Scream into the pillow, go back to sleep. Superboy is only half Kryptonian, Jaime doesn’t sleep in his armor, M’gann--hears whatever she wants, whenever she wants.

Bruce put this place together.

Bruce is off-planet.

An hour into Wikipedia-hopping on your phone--it says something about the structure of your universe, that random article feeds you a page on _The House of Sixty Fathers_ , and you’ve made your way instead to Zydeco when you get Jaime’s text.

_Scarab says ur awake, get some rest like a normal person or come help me figure out y I care abt these pendejos stranded on an island. This book is half the class this semester, smh._

_I think I used Sparknotes for that_ , you text back. You use Sparknotes for all of them. Your teachers can tell. _I’m barely passing,_ you add.

His reply chimes: _Ur so weird._ Nothing follows, and it’s perfect. He’s down the hall, probably frowning at his book, and he was or is thinking about you. It’s a different kind of frightening, enough to make you drain every feeling out until your eyes close, nothing to project in your sleep.

-

Days from now: you will stand next to Dick at the funeral, watching another hero sink into the Gotham soil, the only soil Gotham leaves unpaved. He will be oddly stiff, and you won’t notice, feeling a monument nearby and your mother’s grave in the corner, sectioned off with every other starred-marker. Watching Paula Crock roll close enough to toss the first handful of dirt on the lowered casket. You will stare at her for a long time, through her look of concern, then annoyance, then the shake of her head. She’ll ask you to push her back to the car, to fuck with you, you’ll think, and you’ll make a stop at your mother’s grave and fumble to explain until she takes your hand. 

“I remember when she was your age,” she’ll say. “You all have terrible wishes.”

You will wait for some wisdom to follow, something to make you feel better, but that’s it. Her daughter is a dead vigilante and that’s it.

-

**30 March: Happy Harbor**

Where Tye is concerned, success and failure feel much the same: dna evidence from the board leads you to a young meta from Blackgate, whose recent activity leads you south of the border, which leads you to--not Tye. Just a place he was, a place with more victims, more hard calls. The look Jaime gave you when you told Karen to leave them in stasis was searching in a way his armor’s scans aren’t, but you hope he understands. There had been a lot of panicking, a lot of cases of shock--but it happened on the ground, stateside, with a few relatives on the way to give the rest a sense of hope.

People are easier when they’re asleep.

It’s going on four in the morning when the last family is found, notified, and BG tells what’s left of Gamma squad to get cleaned up and rest, let someone else stay with the kids. Someone has to watch, you know, even if the warehouse you busted yesterday isn’t far enough up the chain to assume any meta genes were activated. Your understanding of meta genetics is basic enough that you can’t assume they weren’t, either.

Bruce is still off-planet. Dick is still distracted, distant, like he’s taking his cues from _you_.

And Tye is still missing. You hesitate in the locker room, where you can hear Jaime already starting the water to your right. Conner and Mal are in town getting prepaid phones for the kids who look to be spending the night--or longer--in their care, at Jaime’s suggestion that they can at least hear some familiar voices. La’gaan is an empty space on the bench where he would sit and give you shit for being weird land dwellers who can’t think of a better way than artificial rain to stay clean. Garfield is asleep.

You peel the mask off with the rest of your costume, then the compression shirt, tights, cup, underwear. Half in the locker, half in the laundry. Your skin is lined from it and has that sweaty-ass-and-thighs feeling all over, going clammy in the air.

Going sore and tired, finally, when you step under the spout Jaime has on for you, one space away from his. Being naked with him is nothing, really, though it rarely happens. Being tired with him--enough to lean your face on the wall for a minute and just feel water spray down your back, split and sluice over your hips--that’s real, that’s something. He’s leaning with his back to the tile and his eyes closed, water down his front. Probably just enough to stay warm, think about going to sleep standing up, the way you are. You could, and maybe crumple into the join of floor and wall, live in a cave of your elbows and be _done_ for awhile. You’re tired enough, you think about it.

Jaime wakes up. When you look over his cheek is against the tile and his smile is sleepy, but growing. You won’t sleep in here, you won’t crumple, and when you walk out you’ll both hit the manic side of it, brittle-bright on fumes. “Rob,” he draws out, squinting and already starting to laugh. “Do you put that--Velveeta-shit on your legs?”

You squint back, until your eyes are almost closed and the water is stripping your upper back raw. _What_?

His chuckle is quickly a wheeze. “Silky smooooth.”

_Velveeta_. “Oh, you mean Veet.”

His wheeze is a _shriek_ : “YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S CALLED, THAT IS A YES.”

“That is not--”

His butt slaps against the tile, his feet slip and he barely catches himself, stops trying. “THE GRINGO---FUCKING--WAXES--WITH HOT CHEESE.” He chokes, sitting at his drain coughing out spit and water.

It's not annoyance, you're just _tired_ , closing your eyes and being lazy enough to wash your hair with soap. You've almost scratched the suds out when his hand catches your ankle and pulls, startling you enough that you push him over with your other foot before you stop. Catch the wall, drop to a crouch. Don't follow the reaction through and press your foot to his throat, just--let him have your ankle. 

"WOW," he laughs, rolling himself up and grabbing for your other leg. Your next kick is playful, or at least lacking _intent_. "Do you really, though?" He catches your kicking foot and pulls until you sit, give up. You can't indulge this, you can't wrestle naked in the showers.

With anyone, but especially Jaime.

Close your eyes, breathe carefully with water hitting your face. Open them to find him looking at you over your knees. "Is this you trying to cope, or are you actually okay?"

His nose wrinkles. "A little of both, really."

When he releases your ankles, you both roll up into the same seated posture, hugging your legs to your chests and staying warm under the same spray. It feels like a compromise: he's only inches away, but he could be closer. You could be closer. The water goes from white noise to something harsh; you both blink it continually from your eyes. You sense little to no--agenda, intent--in the way he keeps touching you, reaching up to push at your wet hair and tug at it. It could be a test of your boundaries, or it could just be Jaime coping: messing with whoever is on hand, touching you because you're here.

"I'm sorry he wasn't there," you say. He pushes his hand down the side of your head, you push against his palm and angle him off. You are not doing whatever is happening right now. "I know how bad it is not to know exactly where and how he is--"

"Do you though?" There's no meanness in it, just both of you huddled again, inching closer every time a draft moves over the tiles. You should get out, get dressed, but this isn't a conversation you feel you can walk away from. 

At least he's stopped touching your hair. "My parents were kidnapped last year."

"Because you're Robin?"

"I wasn't. I had to--I had Batman figured out, so I went to him and made him go after them. I stayed in Gotham the whole time." It still feels selfish, the note in one hand and your evidence in the other, aiming Bruce away from Gotham for just-- _just_ your parents. Thankfully, you haven't spent long pretending to be anything else. This might be selfish too: bringing it up now, like your dead mother can hold him those six inches away--

A little longer? Forever?

Jaime shifts his balance, leans his head completely away from the water. You watch his posture shift, his legs slip from the grip of his arms and loosen out with his feet staying flat on the tile. Sliding, the core moving away from you, but his toes come up over your own. You wait for him to apologize, or just follow the motion, kick against your legs until he has room to stand.

He wiggles his toes. You swallow, filter water in to replace what you've lost. "So...your mom, she's been dead for a year."

"Longer," you say, lifting your toes against his feet. The water slithers too far into your mouth; you cough, let it chase you away from him. Crawling gives you the space to stand, wipe your wet face with your wet hands. "Kind of. And my dad was in a coma until recently." The towels are back in the locker room. Your voice bounces on the last syllable, when Jaime cuts the water. "It's why I had time to train." 

Jaime follows you out, but at a distance, his voice preceding him as you dry your hair. "Does Batman...I don't know. That seems kind of convenient."

"No, I--I thought that too." You still think that, find it more satisfying than tactless for him to ask. "It doesn't matter, I want to be here. I want to be Robin." Badly enough to miss the suit, near to two days in it and finally not sweating into kevlar, when you pull on a pair of sweatpants. 

"Is going commando part of that dream," he asks, pinching his face against another laugh. It doesn't matter what you tell him, you think as the blush heats down your neck and hunches your shoulders. He's always going to laugh. He's always going to get closer, reaching out to snap the elastic at your hip. If La'gaan were here, it would be different. If La'gaan were here, you'd be wearing a mask and keeping your mouth shut.

He's so close, so easy--to tell things, to touch. He's not a boy in a hallway, a face at a dinner party, an upperclassmen offering you a tour of their _boat_. And if Tye were here, if your mother were _here_ \--

You wouldn't even know him.

"I'm going to bed," you answer with a shrug. Sullenness flushes through you, itches your back under the shirt you pull on as an excuse, to turn away.

"Won't that screw up your schedule?" If he's disappointed, it's not quite what you hear in his voice. In some part the question is genuine.

"It's more of a guideline, really." When you look up, he's smiling, rubbing the back of his head. You haven't seen him do that in awhile: he's spent too many days in his armor, too. "I was going to cook. Do you want--" he stops, stops his hand, really looks at you. It's not that different from the look he gave you earlier. "Can I get you up, when it's ready?"

Tye isn't here. You don't know what the selfish choice is, anymore. 

"Sure."

She would.

-

**8 April: Gotham**

Dinah can be avoided, to an extent, but ignoring a note from the school counselor won't convince them of your stability. Steph raises both brows at you as you stand up, but you shrug, shoulder your bag and watch your feet carry you over the checkered floor.

You still don't step on cracks when you can help it.

Andy meets you at a corner: you don't have to fall over, but Tim Drake would. Does. He picks you up and--sets you down. Tugs your bag a little higher on your arm and looks startled by your blankness, like he doesn't remember who you are. "Look up when you walk, Drake." That's it. He carries on, and you stand with the green note in your hand, let it happen. Take the moment in and let it out, let everything out, because the office door is three feet away.

"Get in here," it sounds like a murmur through the glass. Miss Albright is looking over the rims of her glasses, and you blink some more. Tim Drake isn't as bright as everyone thinks he is.

Andy hasn't reappeared to toss you down a flight of steps, or something. No one is who you think they are all the time.

"You wanted to see me," you say, closing the door behind you and feeling the click smash around in your head. Your fingertips are tinted purple, you're so nervous. Interesting.

"Please sit, Tim." You think you apologize, but the time between letting go of her door and taking the chair in front of her desk gets lost. You read her credentials while she opens what you presume to be your file, then--another file, and another. You've been to too many schools, had too many talks in rooms like this about too many things you don't want to discuss. They never kick you out, it's never that bad--just. They needed too much, wanted your parents to be too involved, and you think it got to be easier, to move you around and start fresh. Avoid the phonecalls for awhile.

You're not interested in being a good student. That isn't their fault. Isn't, wasn't--you don't know. Tipping back in the chair, you look all the way up the bookcase. She has a cloth doll, handmade, of Pierrot the clown. Distaste overcomes your blankness, and she rifles the papers with her nails and clears her throat for your attention.

"How are things? How are you?"

Your scalp starts to itch. "Fine."

She takes her glasses off. She must use them to read, and the thought of her trying to get a better look at you shifts your focus just past her head. The walls of her office are striped cold blue and beige. Wallpapered, not painted. You think of a nursery in the dark, washed out and faded, and that clown in the corner. "I've been looking over your records from your previous schools." You don't miss a word she says, but you give no indication of hearing. "These are highly praised institutions: Brentwood has a markedly more advanced curriculum than our district."

"I was just passing," you point out. "But you were passing," she presses, rounding out her point. "At the private school, you got Cs. Now that you've transferred, you're getting Ds. Easier subjects; worse grades. I need you to help me understand how that happens, Tim."

You adjust your gaze, look her in the eye now. Her concern appears genuine, but what good is it? The training, the hospital visits, selling the house. You don't do your homework and you don't sleep and you don't _care_. There are ways to play this, but Tim Drake isn't spoiled, or lazy, or--he's just--

_tired_.

"I--"

"I know about your mother. I know your father is recovering--where does that leave you, Tim? I'm here to help you, and I feel like there's a deeper issue here. You can't coast on her death forever, we need to find the real problem--"

Snapping is a quiet, but physical thing. Your pulse picks up, your numb fingers dig into the wooden box of your seat. You give up control for focus, standing up. "My mom is dead and my dad can't walk and that's _not_ the issue? Who do you think does the laundry, or cooks, or picks up after him? Who gets him out of bed every day? You think there's someone to do that because I went to a couple of good schools? Why do you think I _left_?"

Control for focus: she slips her glasses back now that you're closer, leaning over her desk. You rear back. "What happened," she asks, "with the stitches behind your ear?"

You grab your bag. Too startled to lie, you do the next best thing. "I probably got knifed in the head and didn't notice while coasting on grief," you snort, on your way out.

-

You keep a picture of Tye on your phone, look at it once a day before you call Jack just to feel like someone does, who isn’t Jaime. It helps that Jaime is in the picture, holding the phone away from them and holding Tye close. Jaime is laughing, face and mouth open, more than he seems to be with the team. It’s something to think about: that he turns _off_ for the weekends.

While you, clearly, aren’t here for anything that doesn’t involve your cape. Your lunch was lukewarm when they dished it across the counter and it’s cold now, but you set the phone down and spoon in another bite of mashed potato. It doesn’t taste like anything, and you don’t care, the mechanics of eating guiding you through it. Three bites in, Stephanie interrupts. “Something is wrong with you,” she says, stabbing your spork down with her own. You look up. “You got pulled in the office, and now you’re going full-zombie on me.”

“Full?”

“As in fully-preoccupied. As in, I’m used to you looking like you want to faceplant in your meatloaf, but this is actually disturbing to me.” She disarms you with a twist of her wrist, slides the tray to her side of the table and gives you your milk, sliced apples, and her bag of spicy cheddar potato chips. 

What do you pack when you leave home? Tye is sixteen, two years was too long to wait. He didn’t have a car, any license you or Jaime knew of. In the picture, he has a jacket and bandana that likely made the trip. The skateboard, a bag. He rode the skateboard to the station, was planning to go by bus. It couldn’t have been much. There wouldn’t have been food, so--vending machines. You can feel yourself peeling the bag of chips open, but you’re not there, you’re holding the moment too long and thinking about Jaime cooking, sitting down to eat with him. Being gently woken to eat a meal, and how little that happens, ever happens. Shelly did cook, you imagine, but it would always be for him, too. Maurice would flavor every meal with his presence, and then--a bag, a bus, a vending machine. 

“Tim.”

Stephanie takes the phone out of your hands, startles you back to here and now. She sighs, hits the button to turn the display back on. “So which one are you zoning out over,” she asks, showing you your own screen. “Both,” you answer, suddenly interested in the chips. They’re awful: you stuff three more in your mouth.

“My radar is advanced enough to know you don’t do _both_ ,” she snorts. “Like, with anything.” The subject of yourself is also interesting, and also awful. You fill your fingers with another round of chips and start seeing how many you can feed yourself at once. “And you clearly don’t want to talk about it, so this one is important. Do you--like, do you work with him?” Her eyes widen: “Is it Nightwing?”

You nearly choke. “No,” you gasp, chewing, then swallowing. “It is not Nightwing. And it’s not--it’s not happening. It won’t happen.”

She frowns, looking at the picture again. “Are you actually hung up on both of them, 'cause I was just kidding.”

“No, I haven’t even met that one. He’s just--missing. Like those girls you hung out with in junior high.” Like Steph could have been, if she’d been chased out of home instead of her dad. “He’s been missing since the end of February, and the other guy is his best friend. He,” you say, taking the phone from her hand to lay your finger over Jaime’s shirt, “Is hung up on him.” You move your finger, simplify and convey the whole story in millimeters. “And I’m the one he asked for help.”

It’s complicated.

She startles you again: "Is that why you were crying in the bathroom before lunch?"

" _No_."

"But you were." She leans on her hand, head tilted, mouth tilted. You touch your face. "Your eyes are a little red. If you were anyone else zoned out and stabbing their lunch like that, I'd think you were high."

"Please, tell that to Miss Albright."

"Why don't you just tell her about Andy? That's probably the kind of thing she wants to hear."

You fell down and it wasn't his fault. "I can't do that."

Stephanie picks her head up, frowning. Her brow is creased down the middle; one pink finger and one blonde bang are caught in the corner of her mouth. "Tim, who kicks your problems out of the house when you don't want to go home," she asks, shoving your tray to push your phone back to you, Jaime and Tye smiling up from it. After a moment of stillness, the screen blacks out.

"I'm working on that," you promise.

-

At the end of the day, Albright calls you back to the office to collect a note. It's for Jack, though she tries to strengthen your rapport by saying she can't stop you from reading it first. Andy picks up a note of his own, and you realize you ran into him as he left her office. She might know the entire situation. She might just want you to say something, pin him down.

You wish people would just be specific. If you can answer a question with _fine_ , that’s how you're going to answer it. Andy asks what you were in for as you head for two different stops on the same street. "Not getting better grades in public school than I did in private, as far as I can tell."

"That's fucked up," he says, holding the straps of his bag. At the corner that separates you, he pauses. "I guess I shouldn't take your homework."

"I don't really care," you admit. Andy isn't some archetypal jock, throwing or crashing keg parties on the weekends and picking on the archetypal nerd. Your report cards read about the same, but he's a big guy and you're not, and people expect things from you, and not him. It's not the kind of problem you can punch in the face or tell to an adult.

"Want me to steal your note," he offers.

You smile, shake your head. "Thanks, but I've got this." When he walks away, he throws his hand up like he's hailing a cab, and you wave to the back of his head. You have been awake entirely too long for any of this. On the bus, you try to read the note, but words you've seen before are smeared ink on a page, and you quickly give yourself over to the window. To passing landmarks, to the city. Other people's problems save you from yours, for now. You ride to the edge of the neighborhood where people start affording to put gates on the doors, walk a block deep, and let Jack buzz you in. Two blocks more and they start putting grates on the windows.

In the kitchen, you start pulling bread and cheese from the fridge without thinking to do it, and Jack sighs your name at the letter in his hands. "Timbo," but he pulls the paper from the torn envelope and reads it, while you heat butter in a pan and shear lengths of cheese from the block. You know what you're doing, when you look at your hands moving steadily over the bread and pan. Some kids cry, when they get in trouble. Some kids do something worse, in the face of disappointment. You think about Jaime and know there are worse notes Jack could get, worse things you could tell him, but for now: yes, you are the son that fails tests, misses class, but you're also the son who makes him grilled cheese in the afternoon without being asked, and will make pasta later, or pick up takeout from the corner. So maybe this time, he can just--

"I can't believe this."

not--

"What does she think I'm supposed to do?"

say anything. Butter hisses in the pan. He throws the note on the table, wheels himself forward, then back in frustration. "What are you cutting class for?"

"A friend," you say, concentrating on the sandwiches. "He needed help, and it was just one day."

"Well helping people is coming back to bite you," he says, jabbing his finger in your direction, then back at himself, "and now me, in the ass." He slides his hands back through his hair, the way you try not to when you're Robin, and you watch until the pop of a grease bubble turns your attention to the stove. You try to remember him warm and quiet beside you on the couch, sleeping on his shoulder, wanting to be with him or _be_ him. It's still there, but so is his body hooked up to machines, and the way he yells at the news, how you can't imagine introducing him to Stephanie, or Jaime, or Dick. You'd rather fight someone like Two-Face.

"I wish you would just--get your act together," he sighs, backing out of the room to find a new angle and settle himself at the table. The stove blurs in front of you, but you're hitting the hungry, dehydrated side of tired. Blink and it's gone, and you don't tell him that isn't fair, or you wish he'd do the same. You just flip the sandwiches onto a plate, set them on the table, and put the dishes in the sink to soak. 

"Next time you go downtown? Go to the laundromat." You stand at the table, waiting for him to answer--say anything--but when you want him to speak, he has nothing to say.

In your room, you go through Jaime's texts, your notes on the case, your pictures of Tye that do or do not have Jaime in them. You think about the buses that run through the night, here. You think about what people pack when they disappear.

-

**9 April: Gotham**

Your night winds in: you’ve reached the farthest point you go from home without a call, where apartment buildings stand up between houses and rows of low-rent shops. You climb onto a black SUV in the alley between two rows of fences, hop lightly to the top-beam on the right, and make the connection between tinted windows and the masked men you spot through the sliding doors. You don’t extend the bo, but you check the charge on the tazer before dropping into the yard.

On the roof, a girl shakes her way through the upstairs window: you ease her gently into a rough corner, pull your flashlight and shine it into her face. Bruises and scrapes, no sign of a concussion. Just shakes that go on and on. She claws her own knee, squeezes her eyes shut, and forces out _m-mi hermana--_

Back to the window. The girl is younger, calmer: she lets you coax her to the sill, pull her out under her arms and take you to her sister. You take off the cape and wrap it around them. “¿Cuántos niños?” The oldest extends two fingers, holds your gaze, then extends two more. Four assailants. You nod. “No se mueven, _stay_.” As you back down to the window, you keep your hands up, your eyes on them.

You pass into it, through the window and onto the scene. The bedroom door doesn’t lock, but won’t open. Chair pushed under the knob. You pull open the hinges and ease it back from the frame, the chair following. Not a thing that can be done silently, not by you: one man meets you on the stairs, bites on a curse as you shove the staff into his throat and set off the sparks. He falls down the steps, his gun flying into the wall. It goes off--quietly, silencers, professional--

stupid stupid stupid--

and the smart thing to do now is move and keep moving: beat yourself up and they’ll do the rest, three men and your mistake is a blessing when one favors his left arm. You taze the same shoulder ‘til he folds down with a grunt, jab back and catch the next one in the cheek. “Fucking--kids--” he spits, bite marks on his hand when he fits it to your face and throws your head at the wall. Crack goes your head, crack goes the gun, but he was still moving with the force of his throw and the bullet shatters through a picture to your left. The cape can take a bullet, but without it you have to _keep moving_ , faster, faster, don’t look because you don’t--you don’t really care. A fifteen-year-old jumping into a house-arrest and there is no backup, which is the same as no one to go quiet with stone-hard disapproval when you break a couple of wrists to save your life.

Someone has to let those girls back into the house. Someone has to call this in and make sure someone shows _up_.

Not a lot of stairs. The first one gets up and kicks you into the dining room, into the table and you grapple with the lattice of a chair to get upright. You’re dizzy and winded when he kicks you again, hard boot to the stomach that you take, take the wall hitting you in the back, take the bounce that sends you forward. The lights are out, and broken bones or not two more get up to crowd you. You’re not a closer, that’s what the staff is _for_ , and you can’t resort to explosives with unknown victims in the house and two known victims on top of it. 

It’s getting late: you taze one in the throat, jab the next in the ribs. It’s humid in the corner, grunts and nothing for your hits to tell you what you’re dealing with. Harder men than you, older and stronger, with some training. They’ll kill you, if you give them the chance. Jumping lets you plant your hands on the wall and kick out a little harder, push yourself into it. Break the corner and put them in it, go for the soft parts, the joints and throat and temples. Take your hits and keep going. You’re not trying to kill them, and you want to live. You want to get out of this, swinging your leg around and up to kick the last one sideways. Land him on the chairs and jump up to add your weight until something snaps under you both.

The chair drops. You roll away, hold still and just listen. Breathing, just breathing, and a sigh of pain. 

You taze them anyway, to be safe; zip-strip hands and feet, check the side of your head. No blood, on your gauntlet or the wall. You’re so lucky: you give yourself two minutes to watch them sleep and shake it all out. Just two, then you sweep the rest of the house, find two adults in the kitchen with red holes in their foreheads and cold casings scattered under the cabinets.

It could be worse.

Back on the roof, you don’t explain it. The older girl leaks tears through your half-mimed, half-spoken plan to lower them into the yard. “¿Cómo te llamas,” you ask, moving in front of them as they climb the slope to the gutters. “Jasmín.” She swallows, presses her face to her sister’s hair. “Mi hermana es Cristina.”

“Robin,” you say, and she nods. “Cristina, deja Jasmín, por un momento, por favor.” Cristina is still quiet. She looks to be about five, just old enough to start school, to not know what is happening but assume she should be quiet. Her sister is just younger than you, probably.

Probably the same age you were, when.

You lower her first, Cristina still wrapped in your cape; you pass her down to her sister, then follow. Once you’re at the front of the house, you call in the address, let them know they can find the girls at the nearest hospital. You can’t wait for the ambulance, out here.

Several of the nurses know them: you get lucky again, releasing the girls to familiar faces and not even trying to get your cape back. Jasmín stopped talking once you got across where you were taking them, and she doesn’t start up again, just holds the kevlar around her shoulders with her sister going to sleep in her arms, crying quietly into a small shoulder. “What happened,” the nurses ask.

One of them hands you a cold compress: you stare at it, belatedly hold it to your bruised cheek. You remember the neat holes in their heads, the way the glass didn’t even fall from its frame. The three duffel bags in the hall, the SUV parked in the back. “Someone had their parents killed. I was just passing through, I was--they’re dead.”

A hand settles on your shoulder. You don’t like it, shrug it away and take a step back. “You should sit down.”

“I have to go home.”

You walk four steps, stop, hand the compress to the nearest body and keep going. After the door you hit the pavement running, and here the buildings start to butt up against each other, plenty for your grapple to catch on when you shoot.

-

You strip off at the cache closest to the brownstone. Tim Drake crawls through the window at four a.m., lets the city go fuck itself for two hours while you look in on Jack and shuffle back to your bed. In the morning, you will forget to get up. He will eat cold pizza for breakfast and call the school. You will be sick, you will sleep until noon. He won’t ask about your cheek; you won’t tell him.

He will throw the note in the trash, wheel himself to the pantry, the microwave, and come to you with a bowl of tomato soup. You’ll make the grilled cheese sandwiches, dip and eat them with him in front of the tv. No one will know what to say.

Eventually you will shower, and stare into the drain, imagining that you could reach in, pull out hair, then blood, then bone, brain, bullet.

You’ll put that away.

He won’t ground you. When Dick texts you the time of your next break, you’ll be allowed to go. You wish, and will wish--that he would decide what kind of parent to be. Any kind of parent to be.

Now: you toe your shoes off and slide into the bed. Your phone stays under your pillow; you don’t think about leaving anymore.

-

**20 April: Happy Harbor**

Drake is approximating the square root of sixty-nine from under your pillow by the time you separate Rihanna's voice from a dream of the waterfront, chasing vague figures over-under-around shipping containers. The kind of dream that won't let your body rest.

_The things that we could do in twenty minutes, girl_ \--Jaime would call you from down the hall, middle of the night after another long, long weekend. "What," you groan.

You'd take eight-point-six rounds with Clayface, on your own, before you'd do this weekend again.

Dick is so _distracted_.

"Can't sleep," he says, sleep all through his voice and pushing out a yawn. "You were sleeping," you point out, and hear the snap of his mouth closing. Then nothing, then a creak, something sliding. "Pendejo, just--I don't want to go _back_ to sleep."

"Spreading your misery?"

" _Rob_." He's exasperated, tired, he's--not the person who put Rihanna on your phone.

Shipping containers full of kids who needed more than a phone call. Jaime had found the heat signatures, and the count you had based on previous shipments dropped. M'gann had stretched her senses through the rows of corrugated metal, and it dropped further.

"I'm coming over," Jaime warns, hanging up on you. You hold the phone to your cheek a moment longer, letting yourself remember, unpack the day so you can do--whatever Jaime needs. Cassie had stood at Barbara's side and just held her arm, like she was supporting it, while Barbara looked at the comm. Conner was still holding the doors, glaring into the container. M'gann sent Garfield back to the ship, Karen was searching the container for cameras, explosives, reasons.

You'd gone in with Jaime, through the wall of that _smell_ , to check the pulse of every warm body. Barbara came in and helped you resuscitate two of them. The others didn't take.

"I'll call it in."

"Robin--"

"I'll call it." You couldn't get up. Your cape was so heavy, the air was heavy, Barbara _looking_ at you was heavy. Jaime had taken a moment--from shining a light into every corner, checking every face--to pick you up. Barbara put the communicator in your hand. Dick had been waiting for the call.

"Six."

"DOA?"

"A."

Silence. "You did well."

"Whatever."

Jaime's already knocking. Your limbs still feel locked up in the dream when you roll from the bed, set the lights to dim and try to scratch your hair in one direction instead of three. You're missing something at the door, still trying to drag yourself up, out of the day when he crowds you back into your own room and shuts you in. "Shit," he mutters, while you yawn and blink. "You were really sleeping, I should have--"

"No," you say, "I was...having a nightmare." Tonight, it’s easy to admit, to forget how to hold yourself. You are literally holding yourself, chilly arms twisted with your hands sliding the divots of your ribs. Jaime rubs his face while he takes you in, and he doesn’t laugh, he just huffs. “You look like shit, ese.”

You exhale your core to its smallest possible size, fill it back part of the way. "I feel like shit.” Fill the rest: “I think we all feel like shit."

"This isn't the first time though. I mean, most of us have--"

"Yeah, you're right. The first time, I puked: this was nothing." It’s something to say, not necessarily truth or fiction but pages flipping in your head. They’re all a first, they’re all fresh, they all ought to fall short of tonight.

"That's not what I mean."

"I know what you mean."

His posture snaps, rigid like he wants to hit you, but he's too tired to bother. You can't say the feeling isn't mutual. "Pinche gringo." He squeezes the bridge of his nose, rubs his thumb hard against the skin between his eyebrows. "Is this just--is this what happens? We see that shit, we come back, and we bite each other's heads off?"

Dick should have been here. Dick-- _would_ have been here, and distracted feels like an understatement now. Distracted is replaced by _agenda_ , with no energy to wonder what it even is. Did he know this would be this bad, or was he caught by surprise? You think he was surprised. You think he wanted to be here.

_That seems kind of convenient_.

What is Dick doing, while Bruce is away?

"Rob?"

What are _you_ doing, with so many people _away_? "Dinah will probably be here tomorrow. She usually handles this for the team, from what I understand."

"And you're such a fan of her work," he snorts.

You don't answer. The quiet bookends you, isn't as heavy as you feared. When you go sit on your bed, Jaime follows, and all you have to do is wait. Your life before this taught you a great deal about patience. From under your pillow, your phone notes that sunrise approaches: he's put you ahead of schedule.

"When was the first time, like, when you saw something like that?"

"I was three." You could leave it at that, at the sight of Jaime tight-faced at an answer he didn't expect, but there's been enough _leaving things._ "We were at the circus. Someone weakened the ropes on the trapeze." 

He shakes his head. "It's weird, that those things really happen."

"Gotham is kind of--" you stop, struggle with the city in your mind. Pull together your feelings and the ugly glow of its skyline; in his presence it just feels like melodrama. "It's stuck in a movie about someone's idea of the thirties, most of the time."

"Well," he sighs, looking at his hands. "At least I live in a real fucking place."

Laughing lets you lean in, and he leans back, leans harder and pushes you upright. He gets _dense_ , his presence suddenly thick, and heavy, or just your awareness of him. Neither of you wore a shirt to bed, there's just your naked shoulder for him to put his head on. Just your naked arms folding and your naked hands not pushing him off. You can see the dull shine of your nails in the low light, how they're blunt, cracked. The split on your thumb from a time you'd crushed it.

You fit a glove two ways, and you didn’t think about how that word works until you had to break them in.

Jaime burrows into you, reaching across your back so he can grip your arms in both hands and squeeze, spread his hurt. "Sometimes I think, I don't want to find him." His voice is wet, but his face isn't where it's pressed to your skin. "Like if I have to see him like _that_ , and then what? Me sentí, I remember--that thing. The Ent-thing. I could feel how much it wanted to just go, to just get away, and then I felt it happen. And Conner acts like it didn't happen, 'cause he's busy benching a million and glaring at la roja."

His hold doesn't loosen on your arms; you take it as license to keep still, keep your hands to yourself. "I'm not sure what you're saying."

"But you know, right? That happened, tonight happened, and he isn't--here. Shit keeps _happening_. By the time your dad woke up, you were a superhero. What did you even tell him?"

"I don't." His grip shakes off of you, he's hugging you more than he's holding you in place, and maybe that's all he's here for. "I don't tell him anything."

"So you just, don't have anyone?"

You think about Jack, how he acts too depressed to leave the building but you still catch the smell of alcohol or exhaust and sweaty bus seats on him, find things in the pockets of his laundry: receipts, ticket stubs, foil packets. You don't understand it, and you don't ask. You already know how much he doesn't want to go anywhere with you.

You think about Bruce, the unease he still regards you with, may always regard you with, for what you are and how you got here.

Dick brings you ice cream. Stephanie is safer when you shut up.

His hands are on your arms again, just the fingers being careful with you, trying to turn you so he can look at your face, figure out where you're going. You come back, acknowledge and dismiss the queasy fear of having him so close. "I have you, right?"

Jaime deciding to kiss you is his whole face closing, forehead wrinkling and dark, crushed lashes before his head drops. He makes a noise, calls you a pendejo for however many times it takes to feel like your name, and shifts to come at your mouth from above, not below. He's tall, he holds you easily into it from the side while your hands find and lose their bearings, catch his hips and give them up to clutch the sheet. "What about Tye?" Part of you means to hurt, but he laughs, then doesn't. Kisses you again, until you pull back and wait out the answer. "I tried," he admits, arranging his body next to yours because you're not letting him be sure of this. You're not sure of this. "He tried, for awhile, but he's not like that. And I couldn't--it was like he tried so he'd have somewhere to go. I can't do that to someone."

His fingers fidget with yours, stroke at them and pick them up: he doesn't want to talk, talk about that, but he's doing it anyway. You could probably ask a lot of him, right now. "So what am I?"

There's a way you talk when one of them isn't there.

Maybe earlier. When he reached for your glasses and you flinched, but you're not wearing them now. He can see it on your face. He can see it more when you look away. "An asshole, kind of." He sounds happy to say it, making you shift your senses to him, not quite look. "An asshole I like, a lot, even though I don't know your _name_."

He squeezes your hand, where he's still holding it. It's the end of April, that makes this two months, and you remember that too. At two weeks you were still waking up thinking of her waxy, bloated face. At two months, you'd swear you could remember every word she'd ever spoken to you, but you know that was exaggeration and that she'd said very little.

She's dead. A lot of people are dead.

Jaime likes you. Something wakes up, rolls and stretches through a yawn. Takes its time, but there's sweetness in it when you lean back into his space and he leans back into yours. Over yours, over you, and his hands have to figure out how to hold your face because they never have before. It's a weak smile, but you manage it: "If I tell you my name right now, you'll laugh, and it will totally ruin the mood."

That apparently learned, his hands shift and he flicks your ear. "I won't laugh."

Wait for it.

"Sue me with your crazy lawyers for laughing at a gringo's name," he says, punchy enough to roll his head back with his eyes. You lean in and bite his chin, startling the first hiccup-laugh from him, and wrestling draws out the rest. Letting him pin you is nice and letting him kiss you is better. He keeps building to a specific pressure, and you don't even pretend to have one person's preferences down, just biting at him until he huffs in your face and asks _¿qué paso?_

“I’m Tim,” you remind him. He blinks down at you, washed out in the low light but you can see where the pressure is darkening his cheeks, and you poke his side with your knee until he lets it out. “Lo siento,” he breathes, closing his eyes; he’s hitting up against the other side of exhaustion. There’s a tide coming in, then draining out of you both, and you say, “Softer, for now.” He lowers himself into you and his weight distributes, four hands abandoning the cracks in everything to slide over arms and sides, into and out of hair, trying every touch you think you’re supposed to make and then the ones you want. You want to hold hands and be quiet again, tired with him, and feel him licking his lips close enough to strike his tongue across your own. He apologizes for that too, and the absurdity of it makes you rear up enough to lick your tongue right across his mouth, laugh.

He rolls to your side, letting one hand go to wipe his mouth. Being on your side is close enough to sleep for your body, and you drape your free arm over him, hold him close but not flush, and tell the lights to all but disable. “Te quiero,” he says, small and enough sleep in it to make you kick the blanket higher. He laughs, finally, and wheezes out your name, _Tim_. He pets your hair back. You try not to imagine his hands slipping out the short length with disappointment. 

Tye is still missing, she is still dead; this weekend still happened. But Jaime breathes on your forehead and nothing hurts, right now. “You ready,” you ask, and his mouth just opens, just curves against your eyebrow with his hands going still against you.

The hollowed-out feeling in your gut is gone, reserved for--everyone else.

You turn out the lights, roll into him, and sleep.

-

**23 April: Gotham**

He texts you through the first half of the week. Jokes, complaints, pictures. His smile when things are okay, and when it isn’t--when you’re alone for the night, he sends something that sticks with you. _It shouldn’t be like this._

You both know it is, but it’s nice to be told. Everything he does is nice, he just--you have a good feeling, for now. You think this will be good. It’s a feeling you used to have about the cape, but this many months without Bruce, you’re not sure.

You have Jaime. He’s here, to tell you these things. It shouldn’t be like this. The absences exist, but that doesn’t make them right. Bruce _should_ be here. Dick _should_ spend more time with the team. Tye should be in El Paso and maybe--your mom should be alive.

She’d still be absent, but Jaime doesn’t know that.

What Jaime knows is that his birthday is in two days, and his mami agreed to let you stay over if you want to come to dinner. Dinner is on Friday, you can both go to the harbor later. _When is ur birthday gringo_ , he adds. You call him, missing the shape of the words, in his voice. “I’ll be sixteen in July,” you say, instead of hello.

“I KNEW I WAS OLDER,” he triumphs. “So, vas a vinir Viernes?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Muy bien. But don’t get me anything. Pretend you care what I say, as your gift to me, and don’t get me one.”

“It’s in two days, what could I get you?”

His breath seethes into the receiver; you switch the phone to your other ear and the side of your hand brushes over your smile. Lifting your other hand hides it, but Jack is already rolling back from the table, arching a brow at you. You hold up a finger and walk down the hall. “I bet you could manage. Pretend you want to get me something amazing, but don’t, okay?”

“Do you just want to write a set of instructions, on how to be your boyfriend?” Jaime laughs. It doesn’t feel premature to say, and he doesn’t hesitate to say _sure_. You like each other, you kissed, fell asleep together. Neither of you is the type to call it anything else. “So, you’ll text me the time and address?”

“Si, pero--I thought I could like, come get you?” This, however, oversteps. “Sorry, I mean if that’s okay. And no bike this time.”

“That’s fine. That’s--perfect, yeah. I’ll send you the tube coordinates.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

You wait for him to hang up; he waits for you to do the same, giggles after a minute. “Goodbye Jaime” isn’t hard to say, but you still pause before the click. Flip your phone shut a little less nervous, yes, but a little less enthusiastic about your momentary existence.

It shouldn’t be like this.

But it is, and you’re giddy with missing him. In two days you’ll stop missing a body in your bed and his hands that want to hold on as much as yours do. It’s a new kind of absence: before, instead of after.

-

**25 April: El Paso**

The tube drops you in the hot, dry air between three crumbling walls: a wind-scraped skeleton of what used to be a gas station. The highway moved decades ago. Deep breath, you get your jacket off as Jaime lands. He kisses you too hard, but he’s slow, sure, pressing you back to the wall. Dust on the back of your tee, you’ll let him slap it away when he’s done. Two minutes from his teeth catching the bottom of your lip when he sucks on it. “Less is more,” you suggest; he laughs low, rough into your mouth and tells you to shut it.

“Not literally.” His face tilts and he tries to coax you back into it on a slant, slant your body up into his. “Missed you, that’s all.”

Yeah. Muscles you weren’t sure of tightening down your font, against his. You react to him faster than you really thought--so, adjust. “Happy birthday.” You test your hands on his hips, push your thumbs against the armor there. Who feels that, does he feel that? He sighs. His hands are blunt black segments running up your back, over the shirt. There’s a hard quality to it, like polished wood. A similar warmth, when you move your hands up to then down his arms, move his grip to hug your waist. It’s alien in a way that doesn’t scare you, and he knows how tight to hold, how much slack to give. Jaime laughs into your mouth, pulls away. “We’ll be late.”

Breathe, grip him at the elbows to keep him close. “Really, though?”

“No, but pretending might help me let go.” 

He smiles: he’s cute. There’s no escaping or explaining away your affection. You’re concave from it, catching what he feels and sending it back. “You don’t have to,” you say, dragging your weight to pull his body along. Shift his arms, scoop you up. No fires this time, no urgency. His scent was stripped by the atmosphere, he bends a little under the expectation of your weight, then lets the scarab take it. “I should’ve done this last time,” he hums.

You think about it: the cop, the inside of your head and heart gutted still too recently. And still, still: but he’s holding you. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s okay now?”

No. “Yes.”

You fly.

-

The party is on Saturday, in a park better able to hold Jaime’s relatives than the fenced in yard. The Reyes live in a small, two-story house just out of town, and you walk the last few blocks with your elbows scraping together. Learn to be something like friends, again. Middle school, health class: an older woman explaining gold and silver packages, brown paper, telling you how hard it is to go backwards. Holding hands won’t satisfy when you’ve kissed, kissing won’t satisfy when you’ve made it back to home plate. By the time you hit the driveway, he’s a foot away and talking without saying anything, not looking at you. 

What satisfies a sixteen-year-old, anyway?

Dinner for four is still two, three more than you’re used to. Mrs. Reyes is held up at the hospital, nothing more fraught than a late coworker. You don’t know to miss her touches at the table: her husband cooks, guides you into the scene with easy questions. He knows you work with his son, but doesn’t press. Asks how your father is doing instead, apologizes for your loss and doesn’t dwell in it, brings you away from her with more food, something to drink? You say yes to distract from Jaime pushing the food around his plate, watching every way you do or don’t fit at his table. Later, you’ll realize the way he holds suspicion on his face, holds himself back, are things he got from his mother. He takes after her more than he does Alberto, who presents more warmth in his distance, more patience.

Milagro has that, calmly picking at your identity when the conversation slips into Spanish too fast and fluid for you to concentrate on while you eat. Dinner smooths into it, into the scrape of forks and knives on the plates, and there she is. “Do you breathe underwater?”

“No.”

“Read minds?”

“Nope.”

“Fly? Punch things?”

“I punch things, sometimes.”

Jaime slides in: “Milagro, leave him alone.”

“I’m just trying to get to know your _friend_ ,” she argues. You study them until Alberto intervenes, the placid way Milagro winds Jaime up, her steady smile when it works. You imagine it usually doesn’t. He’s off, today, and it’s entirely because you’re here. “I don’t have any powers,” you admit. “I just help.”

“A lot, though,” Jaime says. 

Milagro puts her elbows on the table and leans in over her plate, unimpressed. Jaime fusses over her hovering pigtails until you laugh, let yourself be happy about this side of him. Your interactions with Jack feel like such a private thing, you can't imagine bringing this home. Can't imagine Jaime in the brownstone, settling for grilled cheese or rotisserie chicken from a plastic case. Jaime talking his way around who he is, how you met, why he's there. Jack--being Jack. You frown, setting your fork on the plate.

"Seconds," Alberto asks, sliding the plate away from you as you curl into yourself. Maybe he can see you retreating, doesn't want you to. You wonder how much attention he pays to the people in his life--to his children. How much time he spends at home, how many meals he cooks, how many of their friends he knows personally. 

Stop. You can't take this home with you. Just smile again, put yourself back in the moment and say yes, please.

-

You meet Mrs. Reyes later, while Jaime hands you clean dishes to dry. You're learning his kitchen, getting comfortable opening drawers you don't own. Bianca is a car in the driveway, a banging door, an apology ringing through the downstairs rooms. She pads into the kitchen on orthopedic shoes, sets a cloth bag on the table, and kisses her son on the cheek. Jaime moves over to let her wash her hands, hovers next to you with your arms touching. "Mamá, aquí esta Tim." She leans back to eye you over his shoulders, smiling. There are Jaime's eyes, magnified by her glasses, and the shape of his face. Her lip tucks into her teeth when she smiles, and the shorter hairs at her hairline curl out from where she's pulled the rest back. She holds out a wet hand, and you hand her the towel; when she laughs, you recognize it for a greeting.

"Hola, señora." Jaime snorts hard, grabs the counter. "What?" Bianca cuffs the back of his head, but his protest slides into laughter, he grips the strip of counter in front of the sink, leans forward. "You speaking español to mi mamá, I just--" the word escapes him, he lifts a hand, reaches for it, gives up. "I'm not being mean."

" _No_ , never."

Bianca snaps him with the towel before he can retaliate. "Jaime, saces la basura."

"Si mami." He casts a look back to you as he leaves; you receive it blankly; he gives up with a shaken head.

Next to you, Bianca is your height, maybe taller. A petite woman in mint green scrubs, the sleeves of her black undershirt rolled up. She moves to finish the dishes Jaime left, unsettling you with a sidelong glance and silence. "I can get that--you should eat." Humming, she returns the towel and moves to the fridge.

"Jaime says you've been helping him search for Tye?" You turn the water off, and she repeats it. An odd first question, but not odd to send Jaime on an errand for. You're not quite blank, not with intent, when you look over your shoulder at her. Watch her move slow and steady from the fridge to the table, laying out the wrapped dishes. The final stretch of a long day: your mother had those, but she never slows down in your memory. Another petite woman with her hair pulled back, darting everywhere, hitting her keyboard with loud strokes. Impatient with a flush high on her cheeks, a sunburn across her nose. She was stunning to someone, you suppose. Jack, her colleagues. You never saw her enough from the front. "I miss him," Bianca says; you blink, bring your attention back. "He spent a lot of time here. I made him call me Tía."

"I wish I was here under better circumstances."

To your surprise, she laughs. "You're here for a birthday."

"I mean, I wish I knew him for better reasons? I don't know how we could, though." Even if you had gone on your parents' trips, they didn't spend a lot of time in Texas. "I would--I'd do without, if it brought him back. Or I can say that because nothing works that way, I don't know." You look at the sink, look into yourself. It's hard to enjoy this, feeling like--you're standing in an absence, without filling it. You wonder if Jaime feels it too. "I think I'm trying to say that I'm sorry."

Bianca sighs, closer than she was. She closes the microwave, inputs the time, leaves it. Her nose compresses over something like a smile, and she shakes her head when you raise your brows. "Jaime's friends, there's just something about you all." She hits _start_ , the microwave kicks into a sharp hum. "You don't have to apologize. You just have to finish those dishes sometime this century."

Startled back to your task, you bark out a laugh. Your soggy hands holding a pan this whole time, oil separating from the water. Bianca laughs, at you or with you, and Jaime is definitely worried when he comes back in. "What's so funny?"

-

Time crawls when you undress for bed. Every moment Bart holds still must be like this, but significance is thin and fleeting to a boy from the future. Don't think about him, right now. Jaime undresses on the other side of the bed. It's nothing you haven't seen before, but you look, and he looks. Shy when you catch each other, and something weighs down the moments where you think, otherwise, you'd both be laughing. His limbs have a brittle quality, the bones lengthened and the flesh catching up. "I don't know what to say," he grouses. He pulls a clean pair of boxers on and you see the scarab flush between his shoulders. It sets a charge to your nerves, of all things, dark blue set in the skin. More like a complicated piercing than a tattoo.

"I wasn't talking to you," he says after, fussing with his already-made bed.

"What could I say if you were?"

" _Menso_." He watches as you slide your briefs off and step into your shorts. You snap the waistband at your own hips and arch a brow. "Mi mama will check in before bed."

"That's nice," you say mildly. He throws the pillow at you; you catch it. Turn it over in your hands, hug it to your chest. There's a bed mat and sleeping bag at the foot of the bed, and the bed right before you, between you. "What happens after?"

-

What happens after: the door clicks into place, footsteps carry on to another room. Jaime says _wait_ , and you lay still. Breathe deep to stay calm. You’re dozing when he rolls up, leans over and makes your name sharp enough to cut in the dark. Charges in your nerves, making you hot and nervous when you get up to meet him. He kisses you at the edge of the bed, kisses you onto it in a slow meld, your body finding space around and against his before you put your weight fully into the mattress.

“You still taste like longaniza. Minty longaniza,” he laughs, but fits his hands to your face when you try to pull away. You want it to be smooth, to transition from not touching to touching with any sort of grace, but that’s not what this is. It’s trial and error, an angle that lasts a moment before you’re twisting out of his hands. His tongue in your mouth, your clumsy response, his nervous laugh. Breathing for awhile, moving your hands over each other to hit up against the cusp of something. His neck is smooth and firm under your mouth, but it just tastes like skin, like very little. The pleasure is in the glide of your tongue against its heat, the way his hands tighten on your arms when you suck. “Not too much,” he warns. “No marks.”

“I’m sorry.” Flustered, you retreat: he’ll think you forgot, or don’t understand, or--

“It’s fine--Tim. I’m happy, that you’d want to. I’m happy that you’re here.” His hands find your face in the dark, smooth your hair back. “Maybe somewhere else. They can’t see.”

You end up sucking three bruises over his ribs, with his hands cupping the back of your head. He keeps every sound held behind his rolled-in lips, but he digs his fingers into your scalp when it’s good. Pushing him back against the pillows, you settle between his legs, stare up to his face. You can feel him half-hard under his boxers, against your own ribs. “Do you want to keep going?”

“Um, not right now. They’re probably still awake.” Relief would uncoil you, but it’s there, his skin is there, and relief is something else tonight. A rain-check. Jaime hides his face turning over; you go with him and just--go. Your convex back to his concave chest, hips parted just-so. “You should sleep here. If you want.”

“No,” you snort, “I’d rather sleep alone on your floor.”

“Pendejo.”

You reach over to turn the light off, curl with him like you believe in a world where this happens, to you. Your body finds itself in Texas, hard and barely dressed, with someone who wants it. That happens. He reaches over to hold your hand while you breathe yourselves to a shallow sleep. It still satisfies, the way they said it wouldn’t.

-

Your internal clock wakes you up before ten, and even here the sun is well set. The blue light on Jaime’s desktop blinks in the dark, a low flash and blindness. It’s by touch you realize your bodies are tangled together, all heat without a blanket, chests like furnaces sticking with sweat and your leg thrown over his hip, pinning you both into it.

It still surprises you, how _good_ contact can be, is. His breath is warm and dry against your forehead, fills up the space between your face and his throat, and you are curious with half-sleep, bolder for it, running your mouth up his skin. “Tim,” he murmurs, “you awake?”

“Yeah.” His lips are as dry as his breath, but warmer, touching down against your hair and finding skin, pressing here and there. You tilt your face into it, an eye, a cheek, and you take each in turn. He laughs at you. Sleepy, silly, just messing around. You cut him off at a question, kissing as he pulls you with him. Put your weight into it now, resting your face on his until the air runs out, breathless giggles from you both. "Tim, Tim, is this okay?"

This, what? You have to shift back to feel it, his dick hard and hot digging into your balls. A moment where you're just blank, until you laugh. It feels good. "Yeah," you breathe, "yeah." Rock back, slither yourself between his legs and he braces to push up. You thought it would be--complicated, careful, a start and stop wondering how much he can see in the dark, what he’d like to see, if you could bear to see anything for yourself. 

You thought a lot of things were complicated, before Jack came home. Before she didn’t. Nothing starts or stops, it’s a cascade: his gasp, your hiss, roll up press down, kiss. “We--we have to be quiet,” he whispers. “So stop talking.” He laughs, swallows air, shakes into the next kiss--nervous. You can do nervous, but you won’t show it the way he does. Just your hands a little numb on his arms and your lungs empty too soon. So kiss him harder, be thorough. Keep it moving, hips down and drag with his hum in your mouth. Push it til you pull back and look at each other. Fuzzy at the edges, not blinking, just a squint and glance to go yeah, yeah--hands moving at the same time because this is good but it gets better. Fumble and push boxers down. Now it shutters, skin on skin and the burn, the reality of hair and sweat and the line between _better_ and _hurts_ approaches.

Jaime grabs your face, laughs. “Tim, Tim.” When you keep going, trying to ride the feeling out, he laughs again, shoves you sideways. “ _Wait_ , menso.” Startled, you watch him roll away and lean over the bed. 

It doesn’t feel as simple. You pull your boxers up, start to chill in the air conditioning. Did you go too far, do something wrong? Was it never as simple as you thought? Your face stays hot, shame thick and familiar in your gut, until he straightens up, turns back to you. “Hey.” He gets closer, drops his tone, “Hey, hey, look at me.” Give it sideways, no--you’re not sulking. Really look at him, at the bottle in his hand, at the boxers around one ankle. At his eyes looking dead on--he’s not going anywhere. “Lotion, gringo. That’s it.”

You’re embarrassed; he gets his fingers in your waistband, his forehead against your forehead. Feels your nod at, “Do you still want to--” and doesn’t finish. He’s on top this time, pressing you back, forty-five angle to the edge of the bed and his hands smooth on your waist, hips, thighs. The lotion is cool on your skin, his hand isn’t, jacking you to make up the lost time. Roll with it, roll your hips and he likes that--the truth is

“Oh god--”

The truth is, all you have to do is enjoy this. Lick your lips pump your hips and don’t look away from him, breathe as much or as little as you need to, put your hands in his hair and make him kiss you more, always more. You’re set to give but there’s time for that when he’s done, it’s a faceted word and one of those facets is digging our fingers into his head and coming all over yourself with all the sound held back in your throat. Another facet is harder, your breath pushed through your teeth and your neck exposed to him; but it withholds your eyes. Wide and looking at the light blinking from his desk, until the dark slides back into focus. This happens too: you do this. You wake up with a boy and let him jerk you off after one, barely official date. Because it’s good and you’re laughing, letting him shush you. His hand over your mouth is nice, his other hand jacking you a little more until you wiggle out of his holds. “Stop.”

“You stop,” he giggles, but his hands pull away and he waits for you. Breath, center--or don’t. Stay hazy for awhile, with your hands pressed under your back til they won’t shake. The urgency is gone, you’re settled in for a long haul. When you sit up, he’s happy to start over. You kiss his chin, the side of his mouth, then find it. Your hands are cold skimming his sides, and your mouth drops open for the way he kneels, spreads his thighs. He’s slick when you do wrap your hand around him, laughing again and apologizing. Not as patient as you thought, but you don’t mind. He puts his weight on you and moves his hips, loose, no idea what he’s doing. You put your other hand on the back of his neck and make him kiss you, no idea what you’re doing either. Long strokes that make him whine from the throat. Short ones to shut him up, enough aggression that he gets that’s what you’re doing and that, of all things, makes him shake and lean helpless. His chin crashes into your shoulder and you cradle him with it, through the quiet sobs and come against your skin. You laugh, thinking about the mess and he digs a finger into your side in disapproval.

“You were right,” you pant, “I can get you something in two days.”

“Ay dios mio, shut _up_.”

-

You lie awake for a long time, after, but Jaime is awake with you. His head is on your shoulder and you’re both staring at the ceiling. He asks how you knew, how you know. “What’s knowing,” you wonder, and your voice has all the power of a leaf unfurling from the stem.

“So there are girls, that you still like?” He’s asking for a reason: you start to go in, burrow down to how the question feels, from him, in this context. It won’t answer it, though. Turn, burrow into something else: “Yeah, I guess.”

“But?”

“I just can’t picture this, what we did, with a girl. Things don’t match, it doesn’t--make sense. I like them, I can’t...burden them, with it.”

Jaime turns his face, trying to smother the start of his laughter into your neck. “You can’t--with--you mean your _dick_ \--”

What you feel to be sensible with the ache of your limbs and a drop in your gut, always sounds ridiculous when he says it. He’s good for that; you punch him in the arm as he rolls into you, hugging tight and crying from the effort of staying quiet. “Me,” you admit, “all of it, too.” He squeezes you, chokes, sighs _oh, Tim_ into your hair and kisses the side of your face before falling back into it. You both shake for different reasons, but he doesn’t let go. “I don’t mind,” he whispers. He laughs and slides a hand just under your shorts, settling it in a comfortable way. Minutes pass, letting him sober up, rub slow circles against your skin until you’re rising to punctuate his joke. “The rest either.”

You roll on top of him, warming your cold fingertips against his throat. He’s going to hate you for keeping him up, in the morning.

-

**26 April: Gotham**

Morning is an exercise in balance, a lack of. The disorientation is offset by the quality of its triggers, then exacerbated by the quantity: where are you, how long were you asleep, why were you asleep, who is that, where is your staff--and Jaime rolls into you, answering everything. You're safe, well-rested, happy. Still off. You untangle yourself and dress to walk down the hall to the bathroom, fogged with the sense that something is going very wrong.

Rub the back of your head, breathe. The house is chilly from the AC and quiet, the hall especially. Milagro is playing in her room when you pass, the door cracked and her dolls stood up against the bed frame, holding conference. Alberto smiles at your sleep-heavy face, then laughs at your squint, when he offers you the trimmer he's been running through his beard.

You can already smell food, and Bianca's whereabouts slot into the back of your mind. In your fog, you're already mapping out the house from memory, placing the occupants within it, thinking about entrances and exits. In reality, you're standing across from the bathroom while Jaime's father cleans up the sink and checks his beard in the mirror. Imagining Jaime with a beard makes you think of alternate realities and gold sashes, but doesn't stir you from your funk. When you make it into the shower, it holds on, and you make little effort to push it off. You should, but the reason escapes you. It feels like you've missed something, something else. It's Saturday, you're in El Paso, you're going to the Harbor tonight. You had sex with Jaime.

Rub your face. Check your hands: they're pink from the hot water, working just fine. Yesterday was his birthday, today is a party. You're not in Maine and you're not in Gotham, you're not doing anything dangerous, you're not leaving the stove

on.

Wait.

You had sex with Jaime. You napped before that, the way you do at home, and before that you played video games in the living room, after doing the dishes, after dinner, after--after.

"Five more minutes," Jaime groans, when you shove back into his room, your hair dripping down your face and neck. Your bag is at the foot of the bed, you stare at it, don't move. Your body feels like it's going too fast, you have to pause and question what it's doing. The phone. You're so stupid, how could you forget to call? The one time you don't call, and that's all it ever takes, right? The one time you don't call, the one time you don't wear a seatbelt, the one time you don't get a postcard, the one time you did nothing out of the ordinary and they did nothing out of the ordinary and she died anyway. "Tim, what are you--"

_Pick up, pick up pick up pick up_ , you're saying it out loud and Jaime wakes up, crawls to the end of his bed and doesn't touch you. You put your free hand over your mouth and say it in your head. The phone keeps ringing. Logically, this is stupid. You didn't talk to him for a whole day, what else is new. Logically, your father is in Gotham and goes out in a wheelchair alone in a neighborhood with bars on the doors. Logically your father was kidnapped and injured in the least logical way possible, and aliens exist, and you hang out with Batman. "I don't" feel well, but you can't figure out how to say the rest, just start crouching where you were standing. Jaime rests a hand on your back and lets it follow you down. "Who are you calling?"

Bianca in the kitchen, Milagro in her room, Alberto moving carefully down the stairs, Jaime at your side. The map is there, but incomplete, missing a key player. Jack lets his phone go to voicemail.

Please leave a message after the tone. Beep beep beep beep--

"He didn't answer." The phone falls out of your hands, bounces away when you try to catch it. Logically, you still know where you are, but you can't keep track of _why_. "I need to go." Jaime's face opens, makes the shape of a word, but he doesn't say it. "My dad didn't answer his phone, I need to _go_."

Moments later, when your phone is finally picked up, your things put in your bag, it's Jaime doing them. It's Jaime holding it out to you and making sure your fingers close around the handle. "I need to get dressed," he says, holding his hand over yours. "So, uh, look at me?" You do. "Are you breathing okay?"

"Yes."

"Oh, uh, good. Keep doing that, because I'm going with you. It's going to be fine, he probably slept in or something."

"Okay." If you were shaking before, you can't tell now. Like pressure inside a can, the contents eventually go flat. You can't tell how long Jaime spends in the bathroom. Long enough for you to hit the callback button and go directly to voicemail. Jack's phone is off.

-

"What if nothing's wrong," you ask on the roof of your building. Jaime sets you gently on your feet and lets his armor slide away. Now that the answer to your panic is so close, you're afraid to find it.

Jaime bites his lip. "What, like if he's asleep, or his phone just died?"

"No. Nevermind." It's too pathetic to say out loud. Having thought of the possibility, and having let Jaime tag along, you'd rather go down there than talk about it. "If he is fine, pretend we took a bus up-town, and you're helping me pass a makeup test this afternoon. Geometry." Jaime nods like you're in armor, laying out a plan of attack. This might be easier if you were.

Residents use the front door: Jaime follows you down the fire escape. Pigeons leap from the bars as you pass, people walk between the buildings without looking up. Their coffee cups range from steaming to rattling with change, like nothing is wrong today, just another morning in Gotham. Jack could be on the bathroom floor with his head cracked open and people are buying coffee. You know the cart, around the corner. You take Steph sometimes and she flirts with the girl who runs it. Change rattling, the steps banging under your feet. Jaime didn't get breakfast, if--if this is nothing, you owe him.

If.

Sons and friends don't need to be buzzed in, don't need to deal with the possibility of no one being home. Jaime follows close up the stairs, tripping into you when you can't quite run. You're afraid of too many things. At the door, you’re entirely yourself. Tim Drake drops his keys, lets Jaime pick them up. Sulks while his boyfriend gets the door for him and then, then you shove inside. You should be trying harder. You should be closer to the person who brought him back than the person who lost her, but you don’t get to choose in these moments. You get a side of yourself you don’t miss any day and Jaime to see it. Jaime to see you call out, follow you down the hall. To see it when you push his door open and watch the light stretch from your feet to his bed. Jack is safe, asleep. Facedown in the pillow and his hand resting on the table where he’d turned off his phone. If that isn’t enough to drag the tissues of your throat into your intestines, before Jack struggles awake to acknowledge you, a head of tousled blonde hair shifts beyond his body, and a woman rises topless into the shadows.

Jaime sees it all, before he’s tugging you back by the arm. “Isn’t that like your _stepmom_ \--”

Rip your arm back, without feeling. “I don’t know who that is.” 

Beep beep beep beep beep b--

Fit and give, too many meanings for such small words. Philanthropists _give_ , blood donors _give_. Dams give, hearts give. A held breath gives, and when you go to take it back it isn’t there. Jack calls your name and you’re just done, walking to the door and hitting the hall at a run.

-

The door bangs open and your voice bangs out into the morning, bounces off the storefronts and startles doves and crows into the air. The first robin of Spring came and went and left a red smear in your head, and it pulses neon bright to a dull sunrise, through the fog on the river. Your breath steams, Jaime hugs his arms against the chill and you scream at him, at the stairs keeping Jack where you need him, where he needs to stay and stay safe--

“I THOUGHT HE WAS DEAD, I THOUGHT HE WAS DEAD OR HURT OR--it hasn’t been that long.” You’re angry and shaking or so angry that you’re shaking, and it hasn’t been that long. “He won’t leave, he won’t go to therapy for _months_ and where did she COME FROM, WHERE DID HE _GO_?”

“That’s--” Jaime halts, interrupts as gently as he can, “Tim, that’s the therapist, he said--”

“NO--

“I KNOW, I--HE ONLY LIVED BECAUSE HE LET HER DRINK FIRST, SHE DRANK THE MOST. SHE’S DEAD AND HE LET HER DRINK IT SO WHO IS THAT? WHO _IS_ THAT?”

He’s closer than you remember, grabbing you and swallowing up your sob with his shoulder, the taste of cotton and ozone and sleep, the sound of your name and his hands clutching at the back of your shirt as much as you’re clutching at his. He’s so tall. He smells so good, not--not _like_ something good, just on his own. A tea bag full of speed stick and fabric softener and sweat and mint toothpaste; you’re close enough to catch it all and you don’t know when you started crying, but his hand lifts to the back of your head and he doesn’t seem to mind, sighing oh, Tim.

“I want my mom,” you moan, pressing your eyes against the line of his collar. “I want my _mom_.” His arms move to squeeze you too hard, just right for a minute: you’re so close and he put you there on purpose, he always does. “I had to--I had to figure out who they were, and go to them, and _make_ them save my parents. I did that, _I_ did that, and he can’t just--I need him to _answer the phone_.”

When Jaime answers, murmurs into your hair and pushes your head back to kiss you, you let that be the end of it. You know that isn’t the point, that this is a lot and he’s _trying_ , but it’s nice to be kissed, it’s nice to have this be new and _yet_. The depth of it, and the pauses, where he tells you to _tell him that_ , or asks you to just come back with him, like it’s really something he can offer. Jack should have that. Jack should be kissed, and held when he cries, and if he had just--told you, if he had ever told you anything--

You’re a hypocrite. You’re too tired to be anything else.

-

Jaime takes a bus to the city limits, texting you while Jack's girlfriend--Dana, apparently--packs her overnight bag. At some point the kitchen became a space for these moments: two conversations going on at once, scores from the Knights game on the radio to pretend you're not listening. You're not here, not yet. Three levels of input that you can't focus on individually, layering into your consciousness. The Knights lost by two points; Dana won't just stay for breakfast; Jaime isn't mad.

You should have gone with him. _I'm sorry about the party, I know you wanted me to be there._

"Montanari sliding home in the eighth for the Knights final score, eight to six with the game going to the Monarchs. Not bad but _not_ good enough, it seems--"

"I had no idea he'd be home, he's supposed to be with friends all weekend and he's never barged in like that--"

_Esta bien gringo~ serio tho, trust me when i say there will be other parties. Like this month alone._

"Jack, you need to talk to your son."

"Then what?"

"Then, we need to talk about why your primary caregiver doesn't know you're going to physical therapy, that you're seeing someone, and why he's a fifteen year old kid."

_Take care of ur fam and call me later. ___

"Dana, please. I can't afford--"

"A live-in maid? Me either, but someone should be checking in, helping you run errands. Someone should be helping _both_ of you. What if something happens that he doesn't know how to handle? What if something happens and he's at school?"

The host cuts to commercial, you turn the volume down from your seat on the counter. _Okay_ , you text back. _She seems cool, at least._

_Having good taste doesn't make u less of a menso, case in point: u._

Her voice moves closer: you put your phone down, see the back of her standing in his door. "I'm not going to say this was a mistake, Jack. I like you, I care about you, and we're both adults. We both decided to do this, but this?" She moves her free hand down in a gesture across her front. "This comes with my input. And not being a secret you keep from your kid. Can you respect that?"

After fifteen years, you still can't predict what he'll say. Can he, with her bag slung over her shoulder, her posture strong and set on walking away from him. With her input being that he talk to you.

It's petty. He turned his phone off.

"Yes. Yes, I can. I'll call you tonight."

"Then I'll answer."

Her footsteps make a mess of your clearing mind. Sneakers clicking like heels, you expect the door to open and this woman to disappear, but she stops in the kitchen. You duck your head, deference for your abrupt arrival that she can take as embarrassment. "This isn't the introduction I'd hoped for," she says. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Rubbing your hands over your face doesn't bring the feeling back to either, much, but it helps. "It's fine. It's not like he can just be alone forever." She reminds you of Dinah, superficially. Tall, fit, long blonde hair. Strong shoulders, her back was muscled when she moved out from under the sheet. A softer Dinah, a Dinah that doesn't try as hard? Maybe, given time, she'll remind you of her, too. Possess qualities you can imagine them sharing, imagine Jack having a _type_. She certainly looks nothing like your mother. There's too much of her, and you feel like there's more patience. Or it's just the honeymoon period, and less time to wear it down. "Do you really like him?"

She grins. "Don't you?"

"He's...my dad." It makes her laugh, but you mean it. Don't have any other answer. You don't _know_ him.

"Well, try not to give him too hard of a time. We all think with our dick sometimes, right?" Your mortified stare, and her genuine laughter, close every conversation in the apartment and see her out the door. The levels collapse into a flat empty space in your head: no white noise, no noise at all. You stew in silence and embarrassment while Jack gets himself into and out of the shower without incident. Water drums through the pipes. You couldn't hear it through the insulation at the house. Thick walls, thicker after the quake. You'd barely moved back in before they left for Haiti. You and the new housekeeper, the new-house smell. Febreeze versus sawdust and cut stone. This building never caved in, never really changed. The basement cracked open along the bottom and flooded, you've seen the watermarks on the walls, think about your hand trailing over the green-black line like an ugly vein until the water cuts off. Until it's time to focus on something familiar, ground yourself waiting for a sign of trouble. Let yourself really feel the false relief, the true sting of disappointment, that he's been humoring you. That he can do most of this himself, now, and you don't need to pick him up. You don't need to help him live, you need to _live with him_. You can't get by with your head on his shoulder and grilled cheese sandwiches, thirty second calls in the middle of the day. The only leveler is that he let you. He put this off too.

"Timbo." You look at your phone, let him hang for a moment. A new message flashes at the top of the screen. When you slide it open with your thumb, Jaime is flying backwards into the rising desert sun, waving at you. You stow the phone in your pocket and hop off the counter. "Hey, dad."

-

You make grilled cheese; he makes tomato soup. You take the service elevator to the roof to eat, and you don't think about wishing Jaime was here. "She seems nice."

"She's a hardass. But she cares, and she's always--" he looks down, searches your plate then your face. "Present. She's _here_." Without warning, your vision blurs over with tears, and when you blink them away he's crying too. Both of you hit with the same grief, but the same guilt, too. "I'm sorry," you choke, trying to rub it away. "I'm sorry I don't spend more time with you." Jack rolls closer, close enough to put his hand on your head.

"But you try, don't you?" He rubs your hair, you lean into his legs under the blanket and hold on. "You do so much, and I'm--Tim. I'm not just lucky to be alive, you know? I get to spend it with you. I can't imagine if it were different, if I lost both of you. I'm so selfish about it, and sometimes...I don't know how else to be. I'm here. I've been so depressed, but if I just shove the rest of it aside--I'm here. I get to do this, and I want to. So don't worry." His hands feel so much bigger than they have, fitting behind your head and holding you into his knees, letting you sniff against the fleece. "I want to be here, I want you to be here. I won't pull a stunt like this again. On my life, kiddo."

You choke, laugh at the ugliness of it and the fact that you can only take his word for it. Like he's a stranger, but a stranger who is your dad, and who says the right things. "Just tell me when she's here. I won't worry if I know someone's taking care of you."

He nods, wiping his eyes with his sleeve while you rub yours against his thigh, sit back and suck the snot deeper into your sinuses. Your sandwich is just starting to get cold, when you pick it back up to have something to do with your body. Anything but more crying.

"So what about you," he asks. Using the mouthful of cheese to stall, you think he's waiting for a heartfelt story of your own struggle in the last four months, the abridged version of which you're still working on. You're stuck at the title. "Have you at least learned a few things about girls at that high school?"

Chew. Swallow. Now laugh, still choking on it and the wet weight in your throat. "Why don't we have a conversation about that _later_ ," you suggest. Let it hang there, looking him in the eye and not giving any struggle. There is no struggle, no denying that part of the pattern--that started in this building, took you across the country, and brought you back--was a boy in blue armor. There are other parts, other secrets, to keep. Jack looks down at his lap, up to the sky, at a billboard painted on the taller building down the street. Food Network, a woman holding a cake almost as permed and polished as her hair. 

"Sure," he answers. "I think I'd like that."

-

When you call Jaime, his party has only died down enough to move to his house. Part of you wants to be an unfashionably late arrival, at least meet the members of his family that are local enough to stay, see the Paco who answers his phone in person. Jaime's aunt sounds impressed with both whatever Paco is doing to hold Jaime away from his phone, and Jaime's desperation to get it back. The struggle gives you time to unzip your jacket, settle around on your bed for a position that is comfortable and, against all reason, posed like he might fly up to your window or walk through the door. When he still isn't on the other end, you make yourself flop the other way with your head all but hanging off the mattress.

"Esa menso," he greets. "Lo siento, I think I'm glad you didn't meet him. Serio." Listening behind the words, you hear the the other voices recede, new voices enter, and a click that muffles them. "I did miss you, though."

"I missed you too." The truth of it doesn't stop the words feeling foreign, stupid in your mouth.

"Yeah? How it go?"

"Okay."

He gives you the silence you didn't know you needed. Waits while it stretches: you wallow in being tired, in not knowing what is adequate for that situation or this conversation. In having him captive at the other end. You both just breathe, until it gets as awkward as admitting you want to be around him, maybe constantly. "The National Guard wasn't called in, so, crisis averted."

"Bad joke," he snorts. "Ha ha."

A little more silence. Just to see when he'll say, "Tim, are you falling asleep?"

"I could," you answer softly, letting the sleep slide through your voice. "We talked. He said some things I needed to hear. I don't know what it all means but, it was nice. I want it to get better? I want to trust that it will and like, he wants it too? So that's more than it was. I'd honestly stopped caring, or I'd convinced myself. So yay for that again, I really enjoyed it."

That, he laughs at. "Shut up, you _really enjoy_ like, everything. You should be sarcastic less, and smile more."

"Do you like it when I smile?"

"What kind of--of course I like when you smile. Unlike you, I am a normal person, I like normal things about people. Like when they smile, and are happy, and have nice legs and tell me their _name_ , finally."

You're going to hear about that forever.

If you're lucky.

"Are you smiling right now, I bet you aren't. I bet you're like, refusing."

"What point would that serve if you're not here?"

"You're worse than Paco, I should just give the phone back."

You grin, curling up on your side around your phone. "Don't. I really do miss you."

When he needs silence, you give it back. He holds the moment, tightens it, and you feel sleep pulling under your skin. "Jaime," you murmur, pulling back. 

"It's really soon," he says. "So I just want to say something, but I have to phrase it so it makes sense, to you."

You rub your face on the sheet. "Okay."

"I really care about you? I don't want to come on too strong, like, fuck this up. But I really do care, a lot. I just want you to be okay, and for this to work out with your dad. And I know you think it can't, and you probably have a hundred reasons for everything you think that is bad about yourself or him, and that's okay. Like, everything about you is okay, I wanted to tell you that. I don't care if you need to cry, or stay home this weekend. You do things that annoy me all the time, but I like that too, I am bad at explaining it."

Swallowing, you stare straight across the bed, through the light of your phone under your head. Into the shadowed corner of your room, like you can siphon the weight of his words out of your head and store it there. Siphon yourself into the corner and wait in it, until you fit the shape of who you are to so many people, in so many places. "I think you're doing fine," you say, voice cracking. "I just--why me? Or don't, don't indulge that, nevermind--"

"Tim."

You close your eyes. _She's present._ "I'm here."

"It's not indulging you if you need to hear it. Commit that to memory por favor, 'cause one day I'm gonna need you to say every nice thing you've ever said to me over again. In fact, I want you to text me a compliment every day from now on. We are making our self-esteem a group project and I'm not doing all the work." You start to laugh; he laughs with you. You're present, you're in the middle of the room, and it doesn't hurt at all. "I didn't pick you, gringo. I just like you. You're a good person, and you've done really hard things, so I get that and I expect you to get that too. You have a hundred reasons for everything you do, but like, they're good reasons. You mean really well, and you're going to help a lot of people. We both are. We're going to help each other do these amazing things, like get Tye back, get La'gaan back. You're gonna talk to your dad more and work on your terrible grades, and you can ask me for help any time. And I don't mind at all because I know, like I _really_ know, that you'd do that for me. You are a good person," he repeats, punctuating the words. "And you work at it, you try to be--and sometimes it is work, and maybe it's weird, but I like that about you."

He sighs. You need one more silence, to grapple with it all, grapple with what he's saying against the fact that he's not _here_ , to just wrap yourself around and express a fraction of it back without words. "Too much?"

"No, no. Now I just." Say it. You have to say it: "Now I really miss you."

"I know. Let's try to remember this feeling next time we spend forty hours on a mission and we're sick of each other."

Sniff, let yourself laugh.

"Out of curiosity, how much have you cried today?"

"But you call me the asshole. Enough. BG is set to cover me anyway, I'm going to sleep through the night and go to the Harbor tomorrow, I think."

"I guess I have a reason to show up, then."

"Jaime."

"Look, you don't know what it's like when you're not there and like, anyone else _is_."

"Tell Paco," you yawn. "I need to sleep, you need to be at your own party."

"Who do you think I tell when you're not around. But yeah, catch up on that and I'll bring lots of leftovers tomorrow. ¡Hasta luego, gringo!"

Something hangs at the end of his words, a space you wait out before answering. "Goodnight." He hangs up to spare you both, but you can feel it hanging after yours too. The final part of a script it feels stupid to follow, even if you think you feel it, even if you might mean it. You wallow in the absence while you struggle your shoes off, start to fall asleep on all of your covers, in your clothes.

It's okay: this is the kind that comes before, not after.

**Author's Note:**

> Artwork by the lovely kiwari can be found [here](http://kiwi-pie.tumblr.com/post/34811230912/my-picture-to-go-along-with-remnantofs-dcu-big).
> 
> As always, a huge thank you to just_peachy for always sharing the enthusiasm for this pairing, audiencing this fic, correcting my abysmal gringo-google spanglish, and helping me stay focused and make better decisions about scenes for a story of this length. I couldn't do it without her tbh. <3333
> 
> For more big bang stories and accompanying fanworks, visit [dcu_bang @ livejournal](http://dcu-bang.livejournal.com).


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